After a cut in Wilson’s _Prehistoric Man_, ii. p. 63. It is also given in Bancroft (iv. 355), and others. It is from the Tablet of the Cross.] Wm. Bollaert, who had paid some attention to the paleography of America,[1095] was one of the earliest in England to examine Brasseur’s work on Landa, which he did in a memoir read before the Anthropological Society,[1096] and later in an “Examination of the Central American hieroglyphs by the recently discovered Maya alphabet.”[1097] Brinton[1098] calls his conclusions fanciful, and Le Plongeon claims that the inscription in Stephens, which Bollaert worked upon, is inaccurately given, and that Bollaert’s results were nonsense.[1099] Hyacinthe de Charency’s efforts have hardly been more successful, though he attempted the use of Landa’s alphabet with something like scientific care. He examined a small part of the inscription of the Palenqué tablet of the Cross in his _Essai de déchiffrement d’un fragment d’inscription palenquéene_.[1100] Dr. Brinton translated Charency’s results, and, adding Landa’s alphabet, published his _Ancient phonetic alphabet of Yucatan_ (N. Y., 1870), a small tract.[1101] His continued studies were manifest in the introduction on “The graphic system and the ancient records of the Mayas” to Cyrus Thomas’s _Manuscript Troano_.[1102] In this paper Dr. Brinton traces the history of the attempts which have thus far been made in solving this perplexing problem.[1103] The latest application of the scientific spirit is that of the astronomer E. S. Holden, who sought to eliminate the probabilities of recurrent signs by the usual mathematical methods of resolving systems of modern cipher.[1104] * * * * *