uscript, as being of Aztec origin; he thinks "it highly improbable that it is Mexican, as nothing like it has yet been found among the monuments of that people; while, on the other hand, it seems probable that it is the workmanship of the same race that reared and inhabited Palenque, seeing that similar characters abound among its ruins." One of the strongest circumstantial evidences, in all legal investigations of the authenticity of documents, is the material on which they are written. False wills have thus been detected by the date in the water mark; and, in this instance, it will be recollected that the material is precisely similar to that which is known to have been brought from Mexico, containing drawing, that were undoubtedly made by the Aztecs. In addition to this, it is a work written and painted on paper made of the Agave Americana, or American Aloe, not a single one of which is delineated by Mr. Catherwood as growing wild among the ruins of Palenque. In fact, it is a plant almost unknown in the level and warmer territories near the coast; it is peculiar to the elevated plateaus of the Valley of Mexico and the adjacent country, and I do not remember to have seen it, in the course of my journey through the tierra caliente, even at the short distance of sixty miles south of the Capital in the vale of Cuernavaca. If it be replied to this that the paper or leaf may have been brought to Palenque from Mexico, the answer would at once show a connection of arts between the people, and go far to prove their national identity or close alliance and intercourse. It should be remembered, too, that works like this would very naturally have been the first to be destroyed in Mexico, and the smallness of their number would thus be successfully accounted for.
From these facts we may fairly argue that this book of eighty yards in length, covered with written characters and illuminated with pictures, is, in all probability, a Mexican production. The figures of the men or demons are evidently similar, both in physignomy, posture and faces, to those on the monuments and idols I have already described to you. But who shall decipher their meaning, or that of the hieroglyphics?
For years the antiquarians of the Old World were guessing at the magnification of Egyptian hieroglyphics, until, in 1799, a French engineer, when digging the foundations of Fort St. Julien, on the west bank of the Nile, between Rosetta and the sea, discovered the fragment of a stone which is now deposited in the British Museum. It contained an inscription in hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek—two of which are ancient Egyptian languages. The Greek was deciphered and the translation applied to the Demotic, and both, again, to the hieroglyphic; and, thus, after years of patient and unceasing toil, a key has been formed by which the present savans of Europe go among the relics of Egypt, and decipher the inscriptions on their tombs as easily as we read the mementoes over the graves of our friends in the cemeteries of Boston or Baltimore. But even if a Rosetta stone were discovered in Mexico, there is no Indian tongue to supply the key or interpreter.
