work, now almost
ready for the press, upon which, in preparatory study and in convincing
discovery, I have been for the past ten years engaged. For I speak well
within bounds when I declare that a complete revolution in all existing
conceptions of American archaeology and ethnology will be wrought when
_Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America_, by
Professor Thomas Palgrave, Ph.D. (Leipsic), is given to the world.

Upon this work I say that I have been engaged for ten years. Rather
should I say that I have been engaged upon it for forty years; for its
germs were implanted in me when I was a child of but six years old.
Before my intelligence at all could grasp the meaning of what I read, my
imagination was fired by reading in the pages of Stephens of the wonders
which that eminent explorer discovered in Yucatan; and my mind then was
made up that I would follow in his footsteps, and in the end go far
beyond him, until I should reveal the whole history of the marvellous
race whose mighty works he found, but of whose genesis he could only
feebly surmise. And this resolve of the child became the dominant
purpose of the man. In my college life at Harvard, and in my university
life at Leipsic, my studies were directed chiefly to this end.
Especially did I devote myself to the acquisition of languages, and to
gaining a sound knowledge of the principles of those departments of
archaeology and ethnology which related to the great work that I had in
view. Later, during the ten years that I occupied (as I believe usefully
and acceptably) the Chair of Topical Linguistics in the University of
Michigan, all the time that I properly could take from my professorial
duties was given exclusively to the study of the languages of the
indigenous races of Mexico, and to what little was to be found in books
concerning their social organization and mode of life, and to the broad
subject of Mexican antiquities. By correspondence I became acquainted
with the most eminent Mexican archaeologists--the lamented Orozco y
Berra, Icazbalceta, Chavero, and the philologists Pimentel and Penafiel;
and I had the honor to know personally the American archaeologist
Bandelier, the surpassing scientific value of whose researches among the
primitive peoples of Mexico places his work above all praise. And by the
study of the writings of these great scholars, and of all writings
thereto cognate, my own knowledge steadily grew; until at last I fel