There are few examples of the aboriginal ideographic writings left to us. Their fewness is usually charged to the destruction which was publicly made of them under the domination of the Church in the years following the Conquest.[1105] The alleged agents in this demolition were Bishop Landa, in 1562, at Mani, in Yucatan,[1106] and Bishop Zumárraga at Tlatelalco, or, as some say, at Tezcuco, in Mexico.[1107] Peter Martyr[1108] has told us something of the records as he saw them, and we know also from him, and from their subsequent discovery in European collections, that some examples of them were early taken to the Old World. We have further knowledge of them from Las Casas and from Landa himself.[1109] There have been efforts made of late years by Icazbalceta and Canon Carrillo to mitigate the severity of judgment, particularly as respects Zumárraga.[1110] The first, and indeed the only attempt that has been made to bring together for mutual illustration all that was known of these manuscripts which escaped the fire,[1111] was in the great work of the Viscount Kingsborough (b. 1795, d. 1837). It was while, as Edward King, he was a student at Oxford that this nobleman’s passion for Mexican antiquities was first roused by seeing an original Aztec pictograph, described by Purchas (_Pilgrimes_, vol. iii.), and preserved in the Bodleian. In the studies to which this led he was assisted by some special scholars, including Obadiah Rich, who searched for him in Spain in 1830 and 1832, and who after Kingsborough’s death obtained a large part of the manuscript collections which that nobleman had amassed (_Catalogue of the Sale_, Dublin, 1842). Many of the Kingsborough manuscripts passed into the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (_Catalogue_, no. 404), but the correspondence pertaining to Kingsborough’s life-work seems to have disappeared. Phillipps had been one of the main encouragers of Kingsborough in his undertaking.[1112] Kingsborough, who had spent £30,000 on his undertaking, had a business dispute with the merchants who furnished the printing-paper, and he was by them thrown into jail as a debtor, and died in confinement.[1113] [Illustration: LÉON DE ROSNY. After a photogravure in _Les Documents écrits de l’antiquité Américaine_ (Paris, 1882). Cf. cut in _Mém. de la Soc. d’Ethnographie_ (1887), xiii. p. 71.]