LORENZO BOTURINI.
After a lithograph in Cumplido’s Mexican edition of Prescott’s Mexico. There is an etched portrait in the Archives de la Soc. Américaine de France, nouvelle série, i., which is accompanied by an essay on this “Père de l’Américanisme,” and “les sources aux quelles il a puisé son précis d’histoire Américaine,” by Léon Cahun.
During these years of uncertainty respecting the Boturini collection, a certain hold upon it seems to have been shared successively by Pichardo and Sanchez, by which in the end some part came to the Museo Nacional, in Mexico.[902] It was also the subject of lawsuits, which finally resulted in the dispersion of what was left by public auction, at a time when Humboldt was passing through Mexico, and some of its treasures were secured by him and placed in the Berlin Museum. Others passed hither and thither (a few to Kingsborough), but not in a way to obscure their paths, so that when, in 1830, Aubin was sent to Mexico by the French government, he was able to secure a considerable portion of them, as the result of searches during the next ten years. It was with the purpose, some years later, of assisting in the elucidation and publication of Aubin’s collection that the Société Américaine de France was established. The collection of historical records, as Aubin held it, was described, in 1881, by himself,[903] when he divided his Mexican picture-writings into two classes,—those which had belonged to Boturini, and those which had not.[904] Aubin at the same time described his collection of the Spanish MSS. of Ixtlilxochitl,[905] while he congratulated himself that he had secured the old picture-writings upon which that native writer depended in the early part of his Historia Chichimeca. These Spanish MSS. bear the signature and annotations of Veytia.
FRONTISPIECE OF BOTURINI’S IDEA.
We have another description of the Aubin collection by Brasseur de Bourbourg.[906]
If we allow the first place among native writers, using the Spanish tongue, to Ixtlilxochitl, we find several others of considerable service: Diego Muñoz Camargo, a Tlaxcallan Mestizo, wrote (1585) a Historia de Tlaxcallan.[907] Tezozomoc’s Crónica Mexicana is probably best known through Ternaux’s version,[908] and there is an Italian abridgment in F. C. Marmocchi’s Raccolta di Viaggi (vol. x.). The catalogue of Boturini discloses a MS. by a Cacique of Quiahuiztlan, Juan Ventura Zapata y Mendoza, which brings the Crónica de la muy noble y real Ciudad de Tlaxcallan from the earliest times down to 1689; but it is not now known. Torquemada and others cite two native Tezcucan writers,—Juan Bautista Pomar, whose Relacion de las Antigüedades de los Indios[909] treats of the manners of his ancestors, and Antonio Pimentel, whose Relaciones are well known. The MS. Crónica Mexicana of Anton Muñon Chimalpain (b. 1579), tracing the annals from the eleventh century, is or was among the Aubin MSS.[910] There was collected before 1536, under the orders of Bishop Zumárraga, a number of aboriginal tales and traditions, which under the title of Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas was printed by Icazbalceta, who owns the MS., in the Anales del Museo Nacional (ii. no. 2).[911]
