Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/433

This page needs to be proofread.

Mvwr Notices 423 the Inquisition of Mexico, that curious anachronism on American soil, which persisted up to the second decade of the nineteenth century. Among these documents now made available to students possibly the most interesting is the record of a discussion in the Spanish Cortes which extended from December 8, 1812, to February 5. 1813, as to the abolition of the Tribunal of the Inquisition, in which the reasons for its establishment and the steps taken to found it are treated. This discussion further developed the idea that the system of the Inquisition in incompatible with that of the Constitution. Docimient no. iv. contains brief statements of fifty-five persons tried by the ^Mexican Inquisition in 1572; no. VI. is a similar list of trials from 1597 to 1601, and no. xv. is a list of those condemned in 1647. The present volume adds considerably to the printed documents concerning the Inquisition in Alexico and worthily follows the useful volume published by Luis Gonzalez Obregon in 1895. In spite of the destruction of many manuscripts there is still a vast amount of material relating to the Mexican Inquisition which requires to be digested or at least published in abstract before its history can be fully set forth. The present volume is a useful contribution to that end. The Spanish Settlements zvithin the Present Limits of the United States; Florida, 1^6^-1^/4. By Woodbury Lowery. (Xew York, G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1905, pp. xxi, 500. ) The late Mr. Woodbury Lowery was peculiarly fortunate in the subject for the second volume of his history of the Spanish settlements in the United States, a work broken off just as he approached the portion where his exceptional opportunities and careful preparation promised results of the utmost interest. How rich the field is which still awaits thorough investigation, and how far the ideas now current may have to be modified, is clearly suggested by the amount of detail new to English readers in Mr. Lowery's account of the familiar episode of the massacre of Laudonniere's Florida settlement and the bloody revenge of the Frenchmen. Although the major part of the material used by him was printed in 1893, it appears not to have been utilized by the more recent American writers who have touched on the subject. The Dos Relaciones de la Florida edited by D. Genaro Garcia in 1902 are equally entitled to rank as new material, at least to students in this country. The unpublished manuscripts to which he has had access consist chiefly of the public and private reports of the Spanish agents at the other European courts. If Mr. Lowery's point of view is at times somewhat clearly from the Spanish side, he might very properly have claimed that this was necessary in order to leave with the modern English reader a correct impression of the causes and the results of the misfortunes which over- took French and Spanish alike. For many well-known reasons, the writers and readers of history, outside of Spain, have for three hundred years been imbued with a deeply-rooted hatred toward everything that