Especially intense was his address against the Law of Amnesty. A close follower of Juarez, he did splendid journalistic service during the re-establishment of the Republic. His life until 1889 was passed as a publicist and man of letters, and in the latter year he was sent to Spain as Consul-General of the Republic there. But his health broke down, and he was transferred to the more temperate climate of France as Consul-General at Paris. Like all men of his race, he grieved greatly at his separation from his native land, and it is thought that this hastened his end, which took place at San Remo in February, 1893.
Altamirano was, perhaps, the most remarkable aboriginal Mexican littérateur of modern times. From his pen flowed biographies, novels, verse, criticism, and political and literary essays in the most astonishing profusion. He pleaded for the development and formation of a national, a purely characteristic Mexican literary style, even as Björnson pleaded for a purely Norse literary language. "We want," he says in one of his essays, "that there should be created a literature wholly our own, such as all peoples possess, . . . we run the risk of being credited as we are painted (by foreigners), unless we ourselves take the brush and say to the world— 'Thus we are in Mexico.' "
The writings of Altamirano, like those of many another worthy journalist-author, were scattered throughout countless periodicals. But they were recently collected and published. Perhaps his most characteristic book is Paisajes and Leyendas (Landscapes and Legends), published in 1884.
Physiologist, logician, and man-of-letters, the late Porfirio Parra, who died quite recently, was one of the most various men in Mexico. He abandoned a chair of Porfirio
Parra. Logic to accept that of Physiology in the National School of Medicine, and he held the chairs of Mathematics and Zootechnology in the National Agricultural and Veterinary School. Born in the Northern State of Chihuahua, he early exhibited signs of great promise,
