More than thirty years have elapsed since the last revised edition was presented to the public. Its editor, Mr. John Foster Kirk, was pre-eminently fitted for his work. He had been Mr. Prescott’s private secretary for eleven years, and was perhaps more familiar than was any other man with the period of Spanish history of which Prescott wrote. He had, moreover, himself achieved a most enviable international reputation by his “Life of Charles the Bold.” In his notes he condensed the additional information which a generation of scholars had contributed to the subjects treated of in Prescott’s pages. Those notes are all incorporated in the present edition. But since Kirk’s notes were penned another generation of students has been investigating the history of Spain--a generation which has enjoyed more abundant opportunities for research than any scholars before had known. Numberless manuscripts have been rescued from monastic limbo, the caked dust of centuries has been scraped away from scores of volumes in the public archives, and the searchlights of modern scientific investigation have been turned upon places that once seemed hopelessly dark. As if this were not enough, explorers from many lands have plunged into the depths of the Mexican forests, and penetrated the quebradas of the Andes, in attempts to wrest from them the secrets of their ancient history. The result is an immense number of volumes filled with statements startlingly diverse and with conclusions widely conflicting. Many of these volumes, especially those that emanated from the explorers, were written by men unskilled in historical writing,--special pleaders, and not historians,--men who were more anxious to demonstrate the soundness of their own theories than to arrive at absolute knowledge concerning the institutions of Peru and of Mexico. It has been the task of the editor of this edition to separate from this mass of material the conclusions in which scholars for the most part agree, and to embody those conclusions in additional footnotes. He has not ordinarily deemed it necessary to specify the authors read. Because he knows that the average reader abhors quotations hurled at him in unfamiliar tongues, he has, in quoting, always used the best known authority in English. In preparing these new volumes for the press the texts of editions previously issued have been carefully compared in order to insure perfect accuracy. In all such matters the publishers have aimed to put forth Prescott’s writings in the form that must be regarded for many years to come as the standard edition of America’s most popular historian. WILFRED H. MUNRO. BROWN UNIVERSITY, December 20, 1904. EDITOR’S PREFACE