e production of craftsmen who had the inheritance of not only
generations, but ages of training. Such a combination of complete
mastery in composition, perfect control of definite and fixed forms, and
hand technique, can grow up from barbarism in no few hundred years. I
would hesitate to think it could even come in a few thousands, unless
they were years of greater settledness and peaceful civilization than
our two thousand years of disturbed and warring European Christendom
have yet had an example of to show us. It is easy enough in the absence
of definite historical records, and in our general ignorance of human
evolution, to theorize and speculate about it all; but the commonly
accepted picture in our minds of a few savage wandering tribes settling
and growing up in this country some several hundred or a thousand years
after the Christian era, simply will not fit in with the fact of their
ability to produce such works a few hundred years later. Had we nothing
but the Perez Codex and Stela P at Copan, the merits of their execution
alone, weighed simply in comparison with observed history elsewhere,
would prove that we have to do not with the traces of an ephemeral, but
with the remains of a wide-spread, settled race and civilization, worthy
to be ranked with or beyond even such as the Roman, in its endurance,
development and influence in the world, and the beginnings of whose
culture are still totally unknown. As to the Codex before us, we can
only imagine what the beauty, especially of the pages we now come to
discuss, must have been when the whole was fresh and perfect.

The second side of the Codex has to be treated in four divisions or
chapters, the first of which includes pages 15 to 18. For numerical
reasons which will appear, this chapter must probably have begun,
however, at least one page further to the left.

These four pages are laid out with three main divisions, upper, middle
and lower. Too much of the upper section is erased for any comment other
than that its arrangement seems to have been parallel in all respects
with the middle section. This latter shows three subsections, the
backgrounds in some cases being red,[24-*] containing each a picture
(probably of a god or a human figure in every instance), surmounted by a
black and a red numeral and by six glyphs, in double column. This gives
12 subsections for the four pages, which we may refer to respectively as
15-_a_, _b_, _c_, etc. Of the initial pairs