Tradition says that the Aztecs destroyed many of the Maya picture records because they recalled the grandeur of the conquered people. But the Spaniards in their turn destroyed much more. Zumárraga, Bishop of Mexico, and Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, made such bonfires of carvings, statues, paintings on wood, and of priceless picture and hieroglyph writings on native paper and deerskin, that only about half-a-dozen fragments of the Yucatan books have ever been found since. Bishop Landa, probably from knowledge obtained from Maya priests, attempted the framing of a key of interpretation, his aim being the translation of certain religious and devotional writings for the use of converts. In this he indicates a certain number of alphabetic characters, but the key did not work, and Dr. Isaac Taylor draws the conclusion that "the systems of picture-writing which were invented and developed by the tribes of Central America are so obscure, and so little is really known about their history, that they must be regarded rather as literary curiosities than as affording suitable materials for enabling us to arrive at any general conclusions as to the nature of the early stages of the development of the graphic art." (_Hist. Alph._, i. 24.) Notwithstanding this somewhat sweeping verdict, the Maya-Aztec scripts have value, if only for purposes of comparison. There is preserved in the museum at Mexico a whole series of pictographs exhibiting incidents as varied as the migrations of tribes, the annals of the people, sacrifices to the gods, and the education of children, the tasks set them, the punishments inflicted on them, and the food given them. To the hieroglyph there succeeds the gradually conventionalised sign, of which examples from Red Indian scripts have been given:--the arrow, to denote an enemy; several arrows, several enemies; the direction of the arrow's point, the direction taken by the enemy; a piece of maize cake protruding from the mouth, to denote eating; the symbol for water between the lips, to signify drinking; horizontal lines, with arrow-headed characters on them, to denote the hoed or cultivated ground, some of these ideographs being coloured to correspond with the thing suggested; and, as an example of the more abstruse, the extended arms, probably to denote negation,--all marking the advance to phonetic syllabic writing. The names of persons and places are sometimes indicated by symbolic figures; _e.g._ Chapultepec, or "grasshopper hill," is represented by a hill and a grasshopper; Tzompanco, "the place of skulls," by a skull on a bar between two posts, as enemies' skulls used to be set up; and Macuilxochitl, the "five flowers," by five dots and a flower. Sometimes we find the species of pun known as the _rebus_ adopted. A picture is made to stand for the sound of the word, as _e.g._ among ourselves in guessing games, when a whisk broom and a key stand for "whiskey," or in the series of pictures of an eye,