[918] Brasseur, Bib. Mex.-Guat., p. 30. See Vol. II. p. 429. The Spanish title is Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan.
[919] From the Proc. of the Amer. Philos. Soc., xxiv.
[920] Cf. Bandelier in Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., vol. i. p. 88.
[921] The second edition was called Los tres Siglos de la Dominacion Española en Yucatan (Campeche and Merida, 2 vols., 1842, 1845). It was edited unsatisfactorily by Justo Sierra. Cf. Vol. II. p. 429; Brasseur, Bib. Mex.-Guat., p. 47.
This, like Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor’s Historia de la Conquista de la Provincia de el Itza, reduccion, y progressos de la de el Lacandon, y otras naciones de Indios Barbaros, de la mediacion de el Reyno de Gautimala, a las Provincias de Yucatan, en la America Septentrional (Madrid, 1701), (which, says Bandelier, is of importance for that part of Yucatan which has remained unexplored), has mostly to do with the Indians under the Spanish rule, but the books are not devoid of usefulness in the study of the early tribes.
Of the modern comments on the Yucatan ancient history, those of Brasseur in his Nations Civilisées are more to be trusted than his introduction to his edition of Landa, which needs to be taken with due recognition of his later vagaries; and Brinton has studied their history at some length in the introduction to his Maya Chronicles. The first volume of Eligio Ancona’s Hist. de Yucatan covers the early period. See Vol. II. p. 429. Brinton calls it “disappointingly superficial.” There is much that is popularly retrospective in the various and not always stable contributions of Dr. Le Plongeon and his wife. The last of Mrs. Le Plongeon’s papers is one on “The Mayas, their customs, laws, religion,” in the Mag. Amer. Hist., Aug., 1887. Bancroft’s second volume groups the necessary references to every phase of Maya history. Cf. Charnay, English translation, ch. 15; and Geronimo Castillo’s Diccionario Histórico, biográfico y monumental de Yucatan (Mérida, 1866). Of Crescencio Carrillo and his Historia Antigua de Yucatan (Mérida, 1881), Brinton says: “I know of no other Yucatecan who has equal enthusiasm or so just an estimate of the antiquarian riches of his native land” (Amer. Hero Myths, 147). Bastian summarizes the history of Yucatan and Guatemala in the second volume of his Culturländer des alten Amerika.
[922] Yucatan, ii. 79.
[923] See C. H. Berendt on the hist. docs. of Guatemala in Smithsonian Report, 1876. There is a partial bibliography of Guatemala in W. T. Brigham’s Guatemala the land of the Quetzal (N. Y., 1887), and another by Bandelier in the Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., vol. i. p. 101. The references in Brasseur’s Hist. Nations Civilisées, and in Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. v., will be a ready means for collating the early sources.
[924] Scherzer and Brasseur are somewhat at variance here.
[925] “There are some coincidences between the Old Testament and the Quiché MS. which are certainly startling.” Müller’s Chips, i. 328.