concerning Maya chronology must go at last.”[66] The trouble with following Landa has been the inaccuracy of the translation by the Abbé Brasseur as well as a certain confusion existing within the original manuscript.[67] Brinton says: “The Mayas were naturally a literary people. Had they been offered the slightest chance for the cultivation of their intellects, they would have become a nation of readers and writers.” Instead of having this chance they were crushed by the Spaniards and never rose again. But the decline of the Mayas cannot be altogether laid at the door of Spain. The remnant of the stock encountered by the Spaniards was already on the down road and had been for a long period.[68] That the Mayas had long passed the zenith of their progress is generally admitted, and we are not entirely sure that the people we know as Mayas were the original stock or only a mixture of the original and an inferior, wilder stock which mingled with them in the days of their decline. When a stock declined or became extinct, other stocks from contiguous territory or from farther off were likely to come in and possess themselves of whatever they found that was valuable and also become permanent residents of the country, just as the Navajos took up their home in a land that was formerly the residence of a different, house-building stock of whom the Navajos preserve, so far as I am aware, barely a reminiscence. Berendt thus describes the neighbourhood of Cintla: “Not a single tradition, not a single native name survives to cast any light upon these ruins. The whole of this coast was depopulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owing to the slave-hunting incursions of the filibusters and man-hunters. The Indians who are now found in the neighbourhood have removed there from the interior since the beginning of the present century, and are absolutely ignorant of the origin or builders of this city.” Not until we are in possession of historical data from the Mayas themselves, if that happy time ever arrives, can we be absolutely certain as to the present descendants.