It is to be regretted that the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg should have sanctioned the application of this name to the Quiché MS. discovered by Father Ximenes, and that he should apparently have translated it by 'Livre sacré' instead of 'Livre national,' or 'Libro del comun,' as proposed by Ximenes. Such small inaccuracies are sure to produce great confusion. Nothing but a desire to have a fine sounding title could have led the editor to commit this mistake, for he himself confesses that the work published by him has no right to the title 'Popol Vuh,' and that 'Popol Vuh' does not mean 'Livre sacré.' Nor is there any more reason to suppose, with the learned Abbé, that the first two books of the Quiché MS. contain an almost literal transcript of the 'Popol Vuh,' or that the 'Popol Vuh; was the original of the 'Teo-Amoxtli,' or the sacred book of the Toltecs. All we know is, that the author wrote his anonymous work because the 'Popol Vuh'--the national book, or the national tradition--was dying out, and that he comprehended in the first two sections the ancient traditions common to the whole race, while he devoted the last two to the historical annals of the Quichés, the ruling nation at the time of the Conquest in what is now the republic of Guatemala. If we look at the MS. in this light, there is nothing at all suspicious in its character and its contents. The author wished to save from destruction the stories which he had heard as a child of his gods and his ancestors. Though the general outline of these stories may have been preserved partly in the schools, partly in the pictographic MSS., the Spanish Conquest had thrown everything into confusion, and the writer had probably to depend chiefly on his own recollections. To extract consecutive history from these recollections, is simply impossible. All is vague, contradictory, miraculous, absurd. Consecutive history is altogether a modern idea, of which few only of the ancient nations had any conception. If we had the exact words of the 'Popol Vuh,' we should probably find no more history there than we find in the Quiché MS. as it now stands. Now and then, it is true, one imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again. It may be difficult to confess that with all the traditions of the early migrations of Cecrops and Danaus into Greece, with the Homeric poems of the Trojan war, and the genealogies of the ancient dynasties of Greece, we know nothing of Greek history before the Olympiads, and very little even then. Yet the true historian does not allow himself to indulge in any illusions on this subject, and he shuts his eyes even to the most plausible reconstructions.