Doubtless there were many MSS. which Boturini did not find, and there are, probably, to this day, going to dust in private and public libraries in Spain, valuable documents in the Nahuatl tongue.[24] For a long time it was supposed that the Nahuatl original of Father Bernardino de Sahagun's _History of New Spain_ was lost; but at the meeting of the _Congres des Americanistes_, in Madrid, in 1881, a part of it, at least, was exhibited. This work almost belongs to aboriginal literature, for a considerable portion of it, notably the third, sixth and twelfth books, treating, respectively, of the origin of the gods, the Aztec oratory, and their ancient history, are mainly native narratives and speeches, taken down, word for word, in the original tongue. Spanish scholars could not render a greater service to American ethnology and linguistics than in the publication of this valuable monument. There is, also, or, at any rate, there was, in the Royal Library at Madrid, a Mexican hieroglyphic work, "all painted," with a translation apparently into the Nahuatl tongue.[25] I would inquire of the learned linguists of Spain whether that document cannot be unearthed. And further, I would ask whether all trace has been lost of the writings of Don Gabriel Castaneda, Chief of Colomocho, who wrote, in Nahuatl, an account of the conquest of the Chichimecs by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, in 1541. That Manuscript was last heard of in the library of the Convent of San Ildefonso, in Mexico.[26] Perhaps it would tell us who the Chichimecs were, about which there is disagreement enough among ethnologists. Of the strictly hieroglyphic records I shall not take account. Their interpretation is yet uncertain, and, as linguistic monuments, they have, at present, no standing. Equal, or superior, in culture, to the Aztecs were the Maya tribes. Their chief seat was in Yucatan, but they extended thence southwardly to the shores of the Pacific, and westward along the Gulf coast to the River Panuco. The language numbered about sixteen dialects, none very remote from the parent stem, which linguists identify as the Maya proper of the Yucatecan peninsula. While there are a number of verbal similarities between Maya and Nahuatl, the radicals of the two idioms and their grammatical structure are widely asunder. The Nahuatl is an excessively pliable, polysyllabic and highly synthetic tongue; the Maya is rigid, its words short, of one or two syllables generally, and is scarcely more synthetic than French. This contrast is carried out in the style of their writers. Those in Nahuatl were lovers of amplification, of flowing periods, of Ciceronian fullness; the Mayas cultivated sententious brevity, they are elliptical, often to obscurity, and may be compared rather to Tacitus, in his _Annals_, than to Cicero.