Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/937

 Mino7' N^otices 927 been taken to compare these with the original texts, resulting in the improvement of some passages, and the restoration, so far as this is now possible, of the native names to the form recorded by the actual ex- plorers. The Introduction and Notes to the De Soto narrative are by Mr. Theodore H. Lewis, and to the remainder of the volume by Mr. Fred- erick W. Hodge of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Mr. Hodge has been able to identify a considerable number of Indian localities which had puzzled earlier writers who have dealt with the journeyings of Cabeza de Vaca, while his frequent visits to the Southwest have given him a familiarity with the country traversed by Coronado's followers which long ago placed him in the position of authority regarding the route of that expedition. Mr. Lewis has also won a position of very nearly equal rank as a court of last resort in matters relating to the much less easily followed route of De Soto, by his contributions to the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. His notes to Pro- fessor Jameson's volume are a most useful summary of the results of his personal examination of a large part of the territory through which the inland discoverer of the Mississippi River must have wandered. G. P. V. Luis Gonzales Obregon has gathered together under the title Los Prccursorcs dc la Independencia Mexicana en el Siglo XJ'I. (Paris and Mexico, Bouret, 1906) various details and extracts from documents bear- ing upon the tendencies to separation from Spain evinced during the first half-century of the life of the colony of Mexico. On stray episode in connection therewith is the application of the " water-cure " to extract from one of Cortes's family a confession of participation in an alleged conspiracy to set up a separate government in Mexico. This work would be more valuable if these early symptoms of a desire for separa- tion from Spain had been traced down to the actual revolts of the nine- teenth century. .Various essays (among them, one by Ferdinand Blu- mentritt) have been written upon the tendencies toward separation displayed from the first among the colonies of Spain in America, but the subject is one which lacks a comprehensive treatment. Jose Luis Blasio, one of Emperor Maximilian's private secretaries, has written a gossipy account of his relations with Louis Napoleon's puppet and victim under the title Maximiliano Intimo: Memorias de un secretario particular. (Paris and Mexico, Bouret. 1906.) Much of it is trivial, some passages violate good taste, but it presents on the whole a pleasing picture, with some new details of Maximilian's private life, also reproducing some little known letters bearing on events at the time of his execution. The English author of a recently published biography, or rather panegyric, of General and President Diaz quoted considerably from what was alleged to be the " private diary " of Diaz kept during the