Page:Here and there in Yucatan - miscellanies (IA herethereinyucat00lepl 0).djvu/124

 we burned them all, at which the natives were marvellously sorry and much distressed.

Father Cogolludo, who went to that country a hundred years later, commenting on the destruction of the books, says: "It seems to me that the books might have been sent to Spain."

Besides burning the paper books, Landa fed the flames with twenty-seven large manuscripts of parchment (deerskin); likewise destroying five thousand statues, of various sizes, and one hundred and ninety-seven vases.

Words fail to express the regret that one must ever feel at this irreparable loss, due only to the misguided zeal of a fanatical priest whose intellect seems to have been groping in the darkness of the middle ages. Could we but have those books in our hands to-day, in this age of discovery, possibly we should find that some of those very things condemned by the good father as superstition and falsehood, were a record of curious facts or studies known in times gone by, and now refound. Who can tell? How many of the recent discoveries would have been regarded, less than a hundred years ago, and even by the most extravagant minds, as utter impossibilities?