Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices | Page 6

find a comprehensive review of it in the Foreign Quarterly Review, No. 17, pp. 90-124, 8vo, London, January, 1832, where he will also find a lucid exposition of the history of the literature of Mexican antiquarian studies.
"In the middle of the third volume of the Mexican Antiquities (side numbers are here absent) there is found the title 'Fac simile of an original Mexican painting preserved in the Royal Library at Dresden, 74 pages.' These 74 pages are here arranged on 27 leaves in the following manner:
Codex A. Codex B.
1, 2, 3, 46, 47, 48, 4, 5, 6, 49, 50, 51, 7, 8, 9, 52, 53, 54, 10, 11, 55, 56, 57, 12, 13, 14, 58, 59, 60, 15, 16, 17, 61, 62, 63, 18, 19, 64, 65, 66, 20, 67, 68, 69, 21, 22, 23, 70, 71, 72, 24, 25, 73, 74. 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45.
"On the whole, therefore, each leaf in Kingsborough comprises three pages of our manuscript. Why the publisher joined only two pages in the case of 10 and 11, 18 and 19, 24 and 25, and left page 20 entirely separate, I cannot say; but when he failed to add 46 to 44 and 45 it was due to the fact that here there is indication of a different manuscript.
"On January 27, 1832, Lord Kingsborough wrote a letter from Mitchellstown, near Cork, in Ireland, to Fr. Ad. Ebert, then head librarian at Dresden, thanking him again for the permission to have the manuscript copied and telling him that he had ordered his publisher in London to send to the Royal Public Library at Dresden one of the ten copies of the work in folio. The original of the letter is in Ebert's manuscript correspondence in the Dresden library.
"On April 27, 1832, when the copy had not yet arrived at Dresden, an anonymous writer, in No. 101 of the Leipziger Zeitung, gave a notice of this donation, being unfortunate enough to confound Humboldt's copy with that of Lord Kingsborough, not having seen the work himself. Ebert, in the Dresden Anzeiger, May 5, made an angry rejoinder to this "hasty and obtrusive notice."[TN-1] B?ttiger, whom we mentioned above and who till then was a close friend of Ebert, on May 12, in the last named journal, defended the anonymous writer (who perhaps was himself) in an extremely violent tone. Ebert's replies in the same journal became more and more ferocious, till B?ttiger, in an article of May 25 (No. 150 of the same journal), broke off the dispute at this point. Thus the great bibliographer and the great arch?ologist were made enemies for a long time by means of our codex.
"From Kingsborough's work various specimens of the manuscript passed into other books; thus we find some in Silvestre, Paléographie universelle, Paris, 1839-'41, fol.; in Rosny, Les écritures figuratives et hiéroglyphiques des peuples anciens et modernes, Paris, 1860, 4to; and also in Madier de Montjou, Archives de la société américaine de France, 2^de série, tome I, table V.
"In 1834 Ebert died, and was followed as head librarian by K. C. Falkenstein. He, unlike his predecessor, strove especially to make the library as much as possible accessible to the public. Visits and examinations of the library became much more frequent, and our manuscript, being very liable to injury, on account of its material, had to be withdrawn from the hands of visitors, if it was desired to make it accessible to their sight. It was therefore laid between glass plates and thus hung up freely, so that both sides were visible. In this position it still hangs in the hall of the library, protected from rude hands, it is true, but at the same time exposed to another enemy, daylight, against which it has been protected only in recent time by green screens. Still it does not seem to have suffered much from light during these four decades; at least two former officers of the library, who were appointed one in 1828 and the other in 1834, affirm that at that time the colors were not notably fresher than now. This remark is important, because the coloring in Humboldt, as well as in Lord Kingsborough, by its freshness gives a wrong impression of the coloring of the original, which in fact is but feeble; it may have resembled these copies some 300 years ago.
"In 1836, when the manuscript was being preserved in the manner indicated, the two unequal parts, which were considered as a whole and which no one seems to have thought susceptible of being deciphered, were divided into two approximately equal parts from considerations of space and for esthetic reasons.
"The first five leaves of Codex A, that is, pp. 1-5, with the