usual in such cases, and he had no other helper than his own son. In spite of all this he was never discouraged in that great enterprise. In order to devote himself entirely to it, he refused to practice medicine in Mexico, ‘throwing away the opportunity of gaining more than 20,000 pesos by the practice of the healing art, and much more by occupations pursued in this country, on account of employing myself in the service of your majesty and in the consummation of the work’—as he himself says in a letter to the king. Not content with describing and making drawings of the plants and animals of New Spain he caused the efficacy of the medicines to be practically tested in the hospitals, and availing himself of his title of protomedico, convoked the practitioners then in the city and urged them to make similar tests and to communicate the results to him. Finally he carried to Spain, 1577, seventeen volumes of text and illustrations, in which was the natural history; and an additional volume containing various writings upon the customs and antiquities of the Indians. Copies of all were left in Mexico, which have disappeared. He wrote the work in Latin; he translated a part of it into Spanish, and the Indians, under his direction, commenced a translation into Aztec.
Arrived in Spain, Hernandez suffered the severest blow possible for an author—instead of his great work being put promptly to press, as he had expected, it was buried in the shelves of the library of the Escorial; to be sure with all honor, for the volumes were ‘beautifully bound in blue leather and gilded and supplied with silver clasps and corners, heavy and excellently worked.’ However, this magnificent dress did not serve to protect the work, which finally perished, almost a century later, in the great conflagration of the Escorial, which took place the 7th and 8th of June, 1671, nothing being saved except a few drawings, just enough to augment our appreciation of the loss. Dr. Hernandez survived his return little more than nine years, since he died February 28, 1587.