This is all we could learn about the Manuscript, nor have we been able to form a supposition, much less to discover in the text itself any clue to the source from which the unknown Maya author could have drawn his data. At the end of the Manuscript Señor Perez gives his opinion that the whole was written from memory, because it must have been done long after the conquest, and after Bishop Landa had publicly destroyed much of the historical picture-writing of the Mayas by an _auto-da-fé_, and because the whole narration is so concise and condensed that it appears more like an index than a circumstantial description of events. These opinions of Señor Perez might cast a well grounded suspicion on the authenticity of the manuscript. We shall try to remove such doubts, at once, by presenting the following considerations. We do not believe that Bishop Landa succeeded in burning the entire treasures of Maya literature at the notorious _auto-da-fé_ in the town of Mani in 1561. The authorities[32] to which we have access describe the number of the destroyed objects so precisely that we have every reason to confide in their correctness. We read of 5,000 idols of different size and form, 13 large altar stones, 22 smaller stones, 197 vessels of every form and size, and lastly of 27 rolls (_sic_) on deerskin covered with signs and hieroglyphics, given to destruction at that time and place. We may believe that the terrorism exercised by Bishop Landa had a powerful influence on the minds and on the newly converted consciences of the natives, and the Bishop no doubt used every possible means to get into his hands as much as he could of what he considered to be “cabalistic signs and invocations to the devil.” But we can never believe that these 27 rolls represented the entire Maya literature, collected for hundreds of years with the greatest care and held sacred by the natives. Such a wholesale destruction would have been an impossibility. We could refer to a similar occurrence that took place in Mexico; and though Bishop Zumarraga has the bad reputation of having destroyed all the picture treasures of the Nahuatls by an _auto-da-fé_, there were notwithstanding so many of them in existence soon after his time in the possession of native families that Ixtlilxochitl, Tezozomoc, and others, were able to build up their detailed accounts of the primitive history of their country from these original sources. Possibly numbers of them may have been preserved among the Maya tribes, for only under such favorable conditions could Cogolludo, Villagutierre and Lizana have obtained the valuable information and material which form the chief interest of their labors and researches, and which enabled also Pio Perez in the year 1835, to discover material from which to interpret so complete a description of the system of Maya chronology. Nay, even, we have a suspicion that Bishop Landa may have laid aside the most important part