successful, and his library, had it been preserved intact, would have
been to-day an invaluable source of information. But the jealous Spanish
government threw Boturini into prison; his library was scattered and
partly lost, and he died of chagrin and disappointment. Yet to him we
probably owe the preservation of the writings of Ixtlilxochitl,
Tezozomoc, and others who wrote in Spanish, and whose volumes have since
seen the light in the collections of Bustamente, Lord Kingsborough,
Ternaux-Compans, and elsewhere.

The Nahuatl MSS. have remained unedited. Few took an interest in their
contents, fewer still in the language. The science of linguistics is
very modern, and that even so perfect an idiom as the Nahuatl could
command the attention of scholars for its own sake, had not dawned on
the minds of patrons of learning.

Boturini catalogues some forty or fifty more or less fragmentary
anonymous MSS. in Nahuatl, which he had gathered together.[22] I shall
recall only those whose authors he names. Some three or four historical
works were written in Nahuatl by Don Domingo de San Anton Munon
Chimalpain, whom I have already mentioned as an author in Spanish also.
Of his Nahuatl works his _Cronica Mexicana_, which traces the
history of his nation from 1068 to 1597, would be the most worthy an
editor's labors. It is now in the possession of M. Aubin.

The _Cronica de la muy noble y leal Ciudad de Tlaxcallan_, by Don
Juan Ventura Zapata y Mendoza, cacique of Quiahuiztlan, extends from the
earliest times to the year 1689. A copy of it, I have some reason to
think, is in Mexico. Boturini possessed the original, and it should, by
all means, be sought out and printed.