So full an account of this interesting discovery would hardly have been appropriate, but for the controversy which immediately ensued. The Spanish authorities in the mother-country and in Cuba were very naturally reluctant to believe, except upon the most conclusive evidence, that a mistake had been made in 1796. The cry of fraud was soon raised. The inscriptions, a rough fac-simile of which had been made and published by the bishop, were declared to be the work of a modern forger. Pamphlet after pamphlet was issued from the press, until there came to be a voluminous literature on the subject. Against the genuineness of the inscriptions there were only two arguments of any considerable weight. The first was in the assertion that the inscriptions were of too modern and crude a nature to have been placed upon the casket in the sixteenth century by those having in charge the moving of the remains. The other was the presence of the abbreviation which was supposed to stand for America. It was confidently alleged that the Spaniards had refused to adopt the name America until after the time of the removal. In both of these objections there seemed to be considerable force. But they cannot be regarded as conclusive; for in the first place a more careful copying of the inscriptions has revealed the fact that they are not so dissimilar to the prevailing methods of the sixteenth century as was at first supposed; and in answer to the second objection, it is to be said that Waldseemüller’s book suggesting the name America was published in April of 1507, and that as early as 1520 the name America began to appear on the maps published for common use. It must be conceded that the crudeness of the inscriptions seems incompatible with what we may well conceive to have been the ceremonious nature of a removal of such importance conducted under royal patronage. But no account whatever of the ceremony has been preserved. We simply know that the removal was permitted by royal order; and the fact that no record of the event is now extant would seem to give plausibility to the conjecture that the remains were transported privately by the family alone. If such was the case, the nature of the inscriptions placed upon the leaden box would depend upon circumstances in regard to which we can now have no knowledge whatever.