We are but at the beginning of our investigation of the Amerind field. Only recently Saville discovered an entirely new form of hieroglyphic in Oaxaca in a tomb believed to be Zapotecan. Organised and exhaustive exploration will yield fine results. “Such organised and exhaustive exploration is the more to be desired,” says Goodman, “for the reason that all the inscriptions so far brought to light are of a purely chronological character, destitute of any real historical importance. They are merely public calendars, as it were, showing that at specified dates certain periods of their scheme would begin or end, or that a correspondence would occur between two or more of their different plans for computing time. Aside from the circumstance that the initial date in most instances undoubtedly marks the time at which the temple, stela, or altar to which it belongs was erected, I do not believe there is the record of a single historical event in all the inscriptions at present in our possession. That a people as cultured as they should have had no historical records at all, would be a presumption too absurd for credence, even without the testimony of the early Spanish authorities to the contrary. The actual question is whether any of them will ever be discovered. If they were inscribed upon paper or parchment and buried with their priestly owners, as we are told, there is very little hope that any vestige of them remains, unless there may have been some instance of almost miraculous preservation. Still that remote chance is worth a vast amount of research. But a better hope ... is that in crypts or tombs or other unexplored receptacles may be collected historical tablets of durable material—stone, stucco, baked clay, or even metal—which patient excavation will yet unearth.” Chance has played the chief part in the preservation of the few documents that have come down to us. In the Bibliothèque National at Paris the Maya one now known as the Codex Peresianus had been neglected amongst a lot of old papers where De Rosny happened to discover it. It has generally been assumed that because there was found one form of writing on the monuments and a similar form in the few documents preserved there was but the one method. This, however, does not necessarily follow. The monumental records and the chronological books may have been written by the priests in the archaic style while the ordinary and common style was something quite different.[65] Pio Perez has been followed with great faith, but Goodman thrusts him aside in the following paragraph: “The man who led everybody astray ... was Don Pio Perez.... In the absence of any regularly ordained authority, he was at once accepted on his own bare assumption as a leader and lawgiver, and then began that journey through the wilderness which has lasted more than forty years.... I ran in the ruck for seven seasons.... Then I turned and went back to Landa—to whom all desirous of reliable information