39 2 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
School of Mines of Columbia University. About that time he began to publish monographs on the archeology of Mexico and Central America — the result of his devotion to these matters while in Cen- tral America. He began to expand his matured views and rich expe- riences in a series of remarkable works, which, though limited in extent, were welcomed by men of science. He had a good knowledge of the Maya language and less so of the Nahuatl. Both greatly aided him in his studies, although linguistics served to him only as a means of attaining scientific ends in other directions. His mental training was logical, thorough, and fundamental, and reflected the critical spirit which we find throughout in the higher institutions of learning in Ger- many. He stated his views frankly and fearlessly, as he thoroughly hated all ambiguity in life, in style, and in science. So were also his literary productious clear, painstaking, and to the point.
The Toltec nation which plays so important a part in the Spanish histories of old Anahuac, was a misconception, he declared ; for the history of this people was partly mythical, partly a series of exaggera- tions, which sprang from the magnifying of rather insignificant facts. To make, as these Spanish writers do, a Mexican empire of the Toltec power, which is said to have preceded the " empire " of the Chichimecs, was just as unhistoric as to say that the governor of the present State of New York is the ruler, king, or emperor of the United States of America.
Quite a number of his monographs were published in the Proceed- ings of the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, some being translated from German originals by Stephen Salisbury, Jr. The first noteworthy work on the archeology of Mexico was his study of the famous Calendar Stone, which was first delivered in German in the form of a lecture in New York City in 1878. An abstract was trans- lated by Mr Salisbury and published by the Antiquarian Society. The original work is far more extensive, and remains among Valen- tines unpublished writings. Of great importance was his argument against the calculiform Maya alphabet contained in Bishop Landa's writings, " The Landa Alphabet, a Spanish Fabrication," 1880. He demonstrated beyond all cavil that the Mayas never had any alphabet in our sense of the word, representing the isolated sounds of the lan- guage phonetically, but that Landa's characters form only portions of ideographic symbols.
Although the Maya calculiform script is still far from being solved, Valentini is to be considered as a pathfinder in this line of reseach for having dissipated many of the illusions and false theories bearing on
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