time of Prof. F. W.
Putnam, of Peabody Museum, and Mr. Chas. P. Bowditch, in placing, with a
freedom by no means universal among curators and researchers, their
material at my disposal, with privilege of copying. I am safe to say
that while I have reclassified the glyphs for my own use as my studies
went on, yet without the copy which by Mr. Bowditch's courtesy I was
allowed to make of his card index to the glyphs of the three codices, as
a start, this edition of the Perez Codex would not yet have reached
daylight through the many other occupations among which Maya studies
have had to take their chances.

At first it seemed possible to prepare a font of separate types for the
various elements of the compound glyphs we find in the texts; but after
having such a font made a number of years ago, and printing a couple of
pages of the Dresden Codex, the result was unsatisfactory; it became
evident that the proper Maya font of type must be both separate and
composite, as is used in Chinese, and not separate only as we have for
Egyptian. The type for the text cards of this edition have therefore
been made this way.

As to the colored plates of the Codex herewith, it is evident that
nothing whatever is gained by preserving the irregularities of the
defaced parts of the Codex, while everything is to be gained by making
all as clear and distinct as possible. The first step therefore was to
have a set of photographed enlargements of two diameters, made direct
from the 1864 issue. From these I made careful tracings, myself, of the
black figure and glyph lines of the original, making at the same time
the separate enlarged drawings from which the type were afterwards made.
At this first drawing only the evident, the indisputable parts were
drawn. The type forms were then classified, arranged in parallel
columns, and compared. All was then gone over, and new points settled on
the basis of the familiarity thus gained. It is a fair estimate to say
that this process of checking and verifying was gone through, first to
last, down to the final proof-reading of the printed sheets, some fifty
times.

One most important fact was established by this process, and must be
noted. In the Perez Codex at least, _nothing is to be taken for
granted_, nothing charged to a careless scribe, and no variants regarded
as being identical in value--with a very few exceptions, to which I
shall advert later. Wherever there remains enough of any glyph to show