It is said that the deciphering of the American hieroglyphics is a rather desperate enterprise, because we have no Rosetta stone with a bilingual inscription. I humbly beg to differ from that opinion; at least as regards the inscriptions on the walls of the monuments of Mayapan. In the first instance, the same language, with but few alterations, that was used by the builders of these edifices is today commonly spoken by the inhabitants of Yucatan and Peten, and we have books, grammars and dictionaries compiled by the Franciscan friars in the first years of the conquest, translated in Spanish, French and English. We do not, therefore, require an American Rosetta stone to be discovered. Secondly, if it is undeniable that Bishop Landa consigned to the flames all the books of the Mayas that happened to fall into his hands, it is also true that by a singular freak he preserved us, in great part at least, the Maya alphabet in his work, “Las Cosas de Yucatan,” discovered by Brasseur de Bourbourg in the national library of Madrid. The Americanists owe much to the researches of the abbé. I consider his works as deserving a better reception than they have ever had from the scientific world at large. It is true that he is no respecter of Mosaic chronology,--and who can be in presence of the monuments of Central America? Reason commands, and we must submit to evidence and truth! I have carefully compared the characters of said manuscript with those engraved upon the stones in Chichen, which I photographed, and found them alike. Some on the frontispieces of the palaces and temples differ, it is true, but do not our ornamented capital letters from the small? Their deciphering may give a little more trouble. The Mayas, besides using their alphabet, employed at the same time a kind of pictorial writing, something not unlike our _rebus_. They also would record domestic and public life-customs, religious worship and ceremonies, funeral rites, court receptions, battles, etc., etc., just as we do in our paintings and engravings, portraying them with superior art and perfect knowledge of drawing and colors, which also had their accepted and acknowledged meaning. These we have already partly deciphered, and now understand.