“The style of painting in the former is considerably more perfect than any other specimen of Mexican design; but as the original is said to have been much defaced by time, I suspect that it has been improved by some touches from the hand of an European artist. The chronological wheel is a just delineation of the Mexican mode of computing time, as described by Acosta. It seems to resemble one which that learned Jesuit had seen; and if it be admitted as a genuine monument, it proves that the Mexicans had artificial or arbitrary characters, which represented several things besides numbers. Each month is there represented by a symbol expressive of some work or rite peculiar to it. “The third specimen of Mexican painting was discovered by another Italian. In 1736, Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci set out for New Spain, and was led by several incidents to study the language of the Mexicans, and to collect the remains of their historical monuments. He persisted nine years in his researches, with the enthusiasm of a projector and the patience of an antiquary. “In 1746 he published, at Madrid, _Idea de una Nueva Historia General de la America Septentrional_, containing an account of the result of his inquiries; and he added to it a catalogue of his American historical Museum, arranged under thirty-six different heads. His idea of a New History appears to me the work of a whimsical, credulous man. But his catalogue of Mexican maps, paintings, tribute-rolls, calendars, &c., is much larger than one could have expected. Unfortunately a ship, in which he had sent a considerable part of them to Europe, was taken by an English privateer during the war between Great Britain and Spain, which commenced in the year 1739; and it is probable that they perished by falling into the hands of ignorant captors. “Boturini himself incurred the displeasure of the Spanish court, and died in an hospital in Madrid. The history, of which the _Idea, &c._, was only a prospectus, was never published. The remainder of his Museum seems to have been dispersed. Some part of it came into the possession of the present Archbishop of Toledo, when he was primate of New Spain; and he published from it that curious tribute-roll which I have mentioned.