antiquities when the officers of expeditions there endeavoured to get the truth thereof from them.
   Having for many years endeavoured to procure as many copies of these inscriptions as possible, and all the information in Europe or America that was available upon them, I have succeeded in securing some of these inscriptions, and all that had any bearing thereon that was in existence. While engaged in studying the languages, histories, antiquities, and inscriptions of ancient American peoples, I came upon similarities to the Easter Island characters, &c.; with these, as keys, discovered what certain groups expressed, and from these, proceeding upon the recognised methods of decipherment, succeeded in reading, into the original languages, and from these, translating into English, these Easter Island inscriptions. In ancient America, from the northern "Lenipe" to the nations in "Anahuac," from these through Central America, and thence onward to what is now Peru, to Bolivia, and to Chili, many of these peoples used hieroglyphic, phonetic, and other writings before the Inca monarchs interdicted their use, and endeavoured to blot them out of existence, so as to secure their conquests, and make the conquered forget their earlier histories and mythologies, and the writings in which they were inscribed. Many of these old peoples of Western America sailed and traded over wide regions of the Pacific Ocean, long before Europeans went there. One of such places to which they sailed was Easter Island, then much larger than it is at present. But as this will be more fully set out on another occasion, we refrain from further pursuing this subject here. Having been requested to contribute one or two of the interpretations of the Easter Island inscriptions to the periodical of the Polynesian Society, I have much pleasure in doing so. Those I offer are from a copy of the inscriptions kindly forwarded to me by S. Percy Smith, Esq., one of the chief officers and promoters of the Polynesian Society, whose earnest labours for Polynesian linguistics, ethnology, &c., have so distinguished him, and have caused him to assist the researches of others engaged in similar studies. (See accompanying Plate.) The copy I obtained from this gentleman is so clear that it is much more easy to read than others, in which some of the characters are obscure, or obliterated by faulty preservation or constant use; but the inscriptions I send, being merely invocations to their ancestral spirits or deities, are less historically valuable than others hereafter to be published, but which will require somewhat lengthened commentaries to make them understood by those not well up in the national lore to which they pertain. The texts of the languages, with a lexicon and grammar of these, will also be presented, as there are in these inscriptions words and phrases from the Toltecan, Queché, Aztecan, Tschimu, Carañ, Quito, Bacatan, Quichua, Muiscan, Collan, and others. Some of these are only borrowed words, but others by their altered case-endings, suffixed genders,