has therefore been the reason for many persons in each of the countries of Europe, and in many parts of America, making various guessings as to what they were about. All expeditions and persons who have visited Easter Island since Captain Cook, or the beginning of this century, have ascertained that the natives they found there were related to the Polynesians, scattered over the region of the Pacific. Some of the least informed, and therefore less qualified to judge or form a correct opinion, have leaped to the conclusion that the inscriptions were written by these Polynesians, or their ancestors of the same races as themselves, either not knowing, or forgetting, that the Polynesians never made such characters or writings, and that the antiquities on Easter Island were different from those in the islands of the Polynesians proved to be their own work. The most positive proof that the inscriptions were not Polynesian work is furnished by the records of the several expeditions and visits of persons, in which it was found not possible to get rational translations from the natives found there of what these inscriptions were about; but, on the contrary, it is shown that each native gave a different interpretation of what he thought, but did not know, these inscriptions and writings contained, or even had relation to. In the accounts furnished to the American, French, Spanish, German, Austrian, Netherlands, British, and other learned Societies, in the publications pertaining to the Easter Island natives or these inscriptions, no translation, even purporting to be correctly given by the natives, or any other person, is furnished of these inscriptions up to the present time, though numerous guessings, all different, are given by various persons.
   The discovery of the key to these hieroglyphics, the methods upon which they were written, and their decipherment into the language in which they were written, or rather in which they were engraved by the scribes upon the tablets, and the translation from the original language into the English, will make available the information they contain; and these old inscriptions will hereafter possess, for the antiquarian, the historiographer, the ethnologist, and others, a very considerable interest, and they will be of the greatest value, as they contain the histories, the thoughts, the knowledge and much else, not only of the ancestors of the peoples who came to this island of the Pacific Ocean, but more important than these, the histories of nations, races, clans, tribes, and mixed peoples who lived in South-Western America, and which have been in no other manner recorded in histories by their own scribes, which have come down to our times; so that we thus regain through these inscriptions, not only the ideas, but the very words of their prayers, and their modes of addressing their household and national deities, the methods of worshipping and regarding their ancestral spirits (who became their deities), the kind of adoration of the priests, chiefs, and people in their worship, both