a number of details on the missions and on the lives and achievements of the missionaries that become important to an understanding of the Indian himself. That such references are overburdened with details of a purely religious character does not at all impair their ethnologic value: they are pictures of the times according to the nature of which circumstances and events can alone be judged properly. We have now arrived at a period marking a great temporary change in the condition of all the Pueblo Indians, and of those of the Rio Grande especially. This is the insurrection, successful for a time, of the Pueblos in 1680, against the Spanish domination. The material on this eventful epoch is still largely in manuscript, the nearest approach to a documentary presentation in full being the incomplete paraphrase furnished by W. W. H. Davis in his _Spanish Conquest of New Mexico_, published in 1869. No blame should be attached to the author for the insufficiency of his data. He made the best possible use of his materials with the help of my late friends David Miller and Samuel Ellison of Santa Fe, but the archives of Santa Fe had already been depleted through neglect and criminal waste, and what was and is left (as I know from having handled it frequently and thoroughly) is a mass of fragments, sometimes long, sometimes short, often disconnected and therefore unsatisfactory. I shall refer to this material later. Of the manuscript materials preceding and foreshadowing the insurrection, an important letter by the Franciscan Fray Francisco de Ayeta, a copy of which is in the national archives of Mexico, deserves to be specially mentioned. To this indefatigable monk, whose timely warnings were too lightly regarded by the Spanish authorities, are also due the data concerning the lives and the awful fate of the Franciscan priests at the hands of the Pueblo Indians on August 10, 1680. The original of this tragic list is in manuscript in the national archives of Mexico, where Vetancurt made use of it in his _Teatro_. The memorial sermon preached and published in Mexico in 1681 (a copy of which exceedingly rare print was procured by my friend the Honorable L. Bradford Prince of Santa Fe) rests for its information upon the obituaries preserved by Father Ayeta. That these obituaries are of direct value to the history of the Rio Grande Pueblos is apparent.