PUBLISHED IN THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF YUCATAN, APRIL 19 AND 21,
1876.

_To the President of the Mexican Republic_,

SENOR DON SEBASTIAN LERDO DE TEJADA.

Sir:

I, AUGUSTUS LE PLONGEON, Doctor in Medicine, member of the Academy
of Sciences of the State of California, of the Microscopical
Society of San Francisco, of the Philological Society of New York,
corresponding member of the Geographical and Statistical Society of
Mexico; and of various other scientific societies of Europe, of the
United States of America, and of South America; citizen of the
United States of America; resident at present in Merida, Capital of
the State of Yucatan, to you, with due respect, say: Since the year
1861 I am dedicated to the iconology of American antiquities, with
the object of publishing a work that may make known to the world
the precious archaeological treasures that the regions of the
so-called new world enclose, nearly unknown to the wise men of
Europe, and even to those of America itself, and thus follow the
perigrinations of the human race upon the planet that we inhabit.

With so important an object, I visited the different countries of
the American Continent, where I could gather the necessary
information to carry through my work, already commenced, and in
part published, "The Vestiges of the human race in the American
Continent since the most remote times."

The New York Tribune published part of my discourse before the
Geographical Society of New York, on the "Vestiges of Antiquity,"
in its Lecture Sheet No. 8 of 1873.

After traversing the Peruvian Andes, the Glaciers of Bolivia, and
the Deserts of the North and North-East part of the Mexican
Republic, in search of the dwellings of their primitive
inhabitants, I resolved to visit Yucatan, in order to examine at
leisure the imposing ruins that cover its soil, and whose imperfect
descriptions I had read in Stephens, Waldeck, Charnay, Brasseur de
Bourbourg, and others.

The atmospheric action, the inclemencies of the weather, and more
than all, the exuberant vegetation, aided by the impious and
destructive hand of ignorant iconoclasts, have destroyed and
destroy incessantly these _opera magna_ of an enlightened and
civilized generation that passed from the theatre of the world some