Note 497 — Chapter II · CENTRAL AMERICA.

There is a celebrated bas-relief on the back wall of a small temple at Palenque, representing a man offering a child to an emblem very like a Christian cross. It is represented in the first series of the ‘Incidents of Travel,’ vol. ii. p. 344. None of the sculptures have given rise to such various interpretations; but nothing would surprise me less than if it turned out to be a native mode of representing a Christian baptism, and was therefore subsequent to the conquest.