and was not quite 14 years of age when his State voted him the requisite funds to enable him to pursue his studies in Mexico city. In 1902 he became Secretary of the Upper Council of Education. On several occasions he represented Mexico in European Medical Congresses. His accomplishments seemed boundless, for he also wrote scientific poetry (Odes to a Skull, to Mathematics, to Medicine, and on the Death of Pasteur), A New System of Logic; a novel, Pacitillas; and countless essays are also from his pen. His only venture in fiction is an interesting picture of Mexican life, and concerns the doings of four fellow-students at the School of Medicine.
Perhaps the foremost writer on the ancient history of Yucatan is Juan F. Molina Solis, who belongs to an old Spanish-Yucatec family, and who was born Molina. in the realm of the ancient Maya in 1850. His History of the Discovery and Conquest of Yucatan is a standard authority, acknowledging original sources only and patiently discriminating between those which are of real value and those which lean towards the marvellous. In journalism, Señor Molina represents the ultra- Conservative standpoint so typical of the Society of isolated Yucatan; but his leading articles are scrupulously fair to his opponents, if their tone is candid, and his patriotism is undoubted.
Modern Mexican fiction tends for the most part towards the realist school. Its note is scarcely one of optimism Mexican
Fiction. any more than is the note of Mexican verse. Indeed, it has been called squalid and sordid. Its most famous protagonists are Frederico Gamboa and the late Rafael Delgado.
Frederico Gamboa has covered a wide field of literature. Just over 50 years of age, he, like nearly all his literary colleagues in Mexico, was educated for the Gamboa. legal profession, but he succeeded in entering the Corps Diplomatique, and was dispatched to Guatemala as one of the Secretaries of the Mexican
