I have tarried so long on the description of my first important discovery because I desired to explain the method followed by me in the investigation of these monuments, to show that the result of our labors are by no means the work of imagination--as some have been so kind a _short_ time ago as to intimate--but of careful and patient analysis and comparison; also, in order, from the start, to call your attention to the similarity of certain customs in the funeral rites that the Mayas seem to have possessed in common with other nations of the old world: and lastly, because my friend, Dr. Jesus Sanchez, Professor of Archæology in the National Museum of Mexico, ignoring altogether the circumstances accompanying the discovery of the statue, has published in the _Anales del Museo Nacional_, a long dissertation--full of erudition, certainly--to prove that the statue discovered by me at Chichen-Itza, was a representation of the _God of the natural production of the earth_, and that the name given by me was altogether arbitrary; and, also, because an article has appeared in the _North American Review_ for October, 1880, signed by Mr. Charnay, in which the author, after re-producing Mr. Sanchez’s writing, pronounces _ex cathedra_ and _de perse_, but without assigning any reason for his opinion, that the statue is the effigy of the _god of wine_--the Mexican Bacchus--without telling us which of them, for there were two. Having been obliged to abandon the statue in the forests--well wrapped in oilcloth, and sheltered under a hut of palm leaves, constructed by Mrs. Le Plongeon and myself--my men having been disarmed by order of General Palomino, then commander-in-chief of the federal forces in Yucatan, in consequence of a revolutionary movement against Dr. Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada and in favor of General Diaz--I went to Uxmal to continue my researches among its ruined temples and palaces. There I took many photographs, surveyed the monuments, and, for the first time, found the remnants of the phallic worship of the Nahualts. Its symbols are not to be seen in Chichen--the city of the holy and learned men, Itzaes--but are frequently met with in the northern parts of the peninsula, and all the regions where the Nahualt influence predominated.