applied not only to historic incidents and common facts, but to abstract subjects of philosophic, scientific, and poetic nature, as instanced in my Native Races.
It needed not the official investigation instituted by the Spanish government to confirm the mute testimony of relics, and the vivid declaration of chroniclers. Native records exist in sufficient abundance to speak for themselves; records written by and for the people, and therefore free from any suspicion of misrepresentation; records used by a number of writers for obtaining that insight into esoteric features of Nahua institutions which could not well be acquired by Spaniards.
The translation of these records, as reproduced in the volumes of Sahagun, Ixtlilxochitl, Kingsborough, and others, with copies of original paintings, have been carefully used both for the Native Races and the histories of Mexico and Guatemala, and introduced indeed more thoroughly in this series as evidence than by any modern writer on the subject, not excepting the learned Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, though unlike this enthusiast I have not allowed myself to accept this evidence with the same non-critical bias.
I have merely used it for what it is worth, after applying severe analytic tests. Certain points may be covered by merely one or two authorities; but even then the erudite student will readily determine the value of the testimony from internal evidence, while in the generality of cases he will find a number of versions by natives and Spaniards, by partisans and rivals, whose contradictions will aid him in determining the truth.
In a previous bibliographic note I have pointed out the many internal evidences furnished by the letters of Cortés, of undoubted reliability on most points, in their minuteness, their frank soldierly tone, and other features. They are besides confirmed in all the more essential points by the contemporaneous letters from the municipality of Villa Rica and the