"during this month (Yaxkin) they commenced to prepare themselves, according to custom, for a general festival which was celebrated in Mol, on a day which the priest designated, in honor of ail the gods. They called it Oloh-zah-kam-yax. After the. ceremonies and usual incensing which they wished to do, they smeared with their blue paint the instruments of all the professions from those the priest used, even to their wives' spindle and the doors. of their houses." Here we see the priests dressed up to represent certain deities, with paint-pot in one hand and strip of yucca or maguey leaf in the other, applying the blue paint to their vessels (see Fig 25).
The following statement, by Col. James Stevenson, regarding the method in use among the Zuni Indians in making and applying paints to their pottery, will illustrate this: "When the pigment is properly reduced and mixed with water so as to form a thin solution, it is applied with brushes made of the leaves of the yucca. These brushes are made of flat pieces of the leaf, which are stripped off and bruised at one end, and are of different sizes adapted to the coarse or fine lines the artist may wish to draw. In this manner all the fine lines on the pottery are produced."
The figures in the upper division of these two plates perhaps represent priests with calendar wheels, determining the time at which the coming festival shall be held.
Those in the second division, of Plate XXXV are probably in the act of preparing the paint.
PART SECOND OF THE MANUSCRIPT.
The title-page.—Although this is occupied almost wholly by characters, 1 think it is best to discuss its general import in this connection.
One of the first things that strikes us as somewhat singular, and as having some hidden meaning, is the fact that there are ten transverse lines (the numerals are not considered separately from the characters to which they belong) and seven characters or groups of characters in each line, making seventy in all—exactly the number of plates in the Manuscript. This arrangement by sevens cannot be accidental, and must therefore have had some particular meaning understood by the author and those for whose use the work was composed. That it does not refer to any of their divis-
