alace and museum. This curious story, yet unknown to the world,
was revealed to my wife and myself, as the work of restoring the
paintings advanced step by step, and also from the careful study of
the bas-reliefs which adorn the room at the base of the monument.
You can see photographs of these bas-reliefs in the album I
forwarded to the Ministry of Public Instruction. We have also in
our possession the whole collection of tracings of the paintings in
the funeral chamber.

Motul is a pretty town of 4000 inhabitants, situated about 10
leagues from Merida. Having never suffered from the Indians it
presents quite a thriving appearance. Its productions consist
principally in the making henequen bags and the raising of cattle.
At the time of the Spanish conquest it was the site of an important
settlement, if we may judge from the number of mounds and other
edifices scattered in its vicinity. All are in a very ruinous
condition, having been demolished to obtain materials for the
buildings of the modern village and the construction of fences. It
was among these ruins that, for the first time in Yucatan, I gazed
upon the incontestable proofs that the worship of the phallus had
once been in vogue among some of the inhabitants of the Peninsula.
I discovered emblems of that worship, so common with the natives of
Hindostan and Egypt and other parts of the world, on the Eastern
side of a very ruinous pyramid, raised on a plot of ground, in the
outskirts of this village. Since then, I have often met with these
emblems of the religious rites of the Nahuas and Caras, and whilst
as at Uxmal, they stare at the traveller from every ornament of the
buildings and are to be found in every court-yard and public place,
it is a remarkable fact that they are to be met with nowhere in the
edifices of Chichen-Itza.

There can be no possible doubt that different races or rather
nations practicing distinct religious rites inhabited the country
at different epochs and destroyed each other by war. So at the time
of the arrival of the Spaniards the monuments of Chichen-Itza were
in ruins and were looked upon with awe, wonder and respect, by the
inhabitants of the country, when the city of Uxmal was thickly
peopled. There cannot be any reasonable doubt that the Nahuas, the
in