It may be quite easily forgiven to one trained with Western, modern eyes, who at first sight of these monuments, in total ignorance of their meanings, sees them as strange or grotesque. But when, as their strangeness wears away, one comes to see the unfailing accuracy with which the glyphs are drawn, one’s opinion of their makers has to change. And when, with this familiarity gained, one advances to an appreciation of the work in its bearings as a whole, one has to acknowledge himself facing the 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.