CONCLUSION _Introite, nam et hic dii sunt._ It is not my desire to add, as a conclusion to a comment bearing on the restoration and interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphic texts, any general discussion of the data which tradition and the early Spanish writers have left us of the mythology, rites and customs of the American races; and still less to run out a line of attractive analogies between isolated instances of their words, symbols or works, with those of any of the various nations of the other hemisphere; nor to build up any theory of descent or intercourse with any of these latter as today known to history. The subject before us is on its very face too vast; the written and traditional data are entirely too scanty and too little understood; and while we are still obliged to designate the various gods and personages of the Codices as god A, B, etc., and are unable to fix definitely[41-*] a single inscribed date in terms of our chronology, or tell the event attached to it, fancied comparisons amount to little. And the favorite “linguistic” method is more fragile yet, especially when the uncertainties of spelling and transliteration are considered, and above all the frequent total ignorance of the past history and changes the different words compared must have gone through since the time when by any possibility a physical transmission from one locality to the other could have taken place. These ought to be commonplaces of research, but it is to be feared that they have not quite yet become so.[42-*] There is no need to give instances of such false analogies which have served as the bases for a multitude of filiation theories, all equally well “supported” by details, and all mutually exclusive. Nor on the other hand can we deny the existence actually of a very great number of resemblances and identities which cannot be ignored, but must imply connexions of some kind. The English nation is not a Hebrew people because it had a prime minister Disraeli, nor Greeks because they have a Queen Alexandra, nor Romans because of certain local names. Such facts even when real, and established as such, may only be evidence of a single continental culture or transcontinental intercourse.