Their northern neighbors, the Cherokees, use an alphabet invented by Sequoyah, one of themselves, in 1824. It is syllabic, of eighty-five characters, and is used for printing. Sequoyah had no intention of aiding the missionaries; he preferred the "old religion," and when he saw the New Testament printed in his characters, he expressed regret that he had ever invented them. What he wanted was to teach his people useful arts, and to preserve the national traditions. I have little doubt they were written down; but here, again, I have failed of success in my inquiries. This is a poor showing of native literature for all the tribes in the vast area of the United States. But, except some orations and poems, hereafter to be mentioned, it is almost all that I can name. Passing southward the harvest becomes richer. When Bishop Landa, in Yucatan, and Bishop Zumarraga, in Mexico, made bonfires, in the public squares of Mani and Tlaltilulco, of the priceless literary treasures of the Mayas and Aztecs, their maps, their parchment rolls, their calendars on wood, their painted paper books, their inscribed histories, it is recorded that the natives bewailed bitterly this obliteration of their sciences and their archives.[21] Some of them set to work to recover the memories thus doomed to oblivion, and to write them out, as best they could. Most fertile of these were those who wrote in the Nahuatl tongue, otherwise known as the Aztec or Mexican, this being most widely spoken in Mexico, and the first cultivated by the missionaries. Many of these memoirs were short descriptions of towns or tribes, with their traditional histories. Others narrated the customs and mythologies of the race before the arrival of the whites. None were printed, and little or no care was taken to collect or preserve the manuscripts, so that probably most of them were destroyed. At length, in 1736-45, an enthusiastic Italian archaeologist, the Chevalier Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, devoted nearly ten years to collecting everything of the kind which would throw light on ancient Mexican history. He was quite successful, and his library, had it been preserved intact, would have been to-day an invaluable source of information. But the jealous Spanish government threw Boturini into prison; his library was scattered and partly lost, and he died of chagrin and disappointment. Yet to him we probably owe the preservation of the writings of Ixtlilxochitl, Tezozomoc, and others who wrote in Spanish, and whose volumes have since seen the light in the collections of Bustamente, Lord Kingsborough, Ternaux-Compans, and elsewhere. The Nahuatl MSS. have remained unedited. Few took an interest in their contents, fewer still in the language. The science of linguistics is very modern, and that even so perfect an idiom as the Nahuatl could command the attention of scholars for its own sake, had not dawned on the minds of patrons of learning.