Note 431 — Chapter XV · FROM CHOLULA TO IZTAPALAPAN. October-November, 1519.

Sahagun, Hist. Conq., 20-1; Acosta, Hist. Ind., 519-20; Torquemada, i. 447. Solis, the ‘penetrating historian,’ repeats and improves upon this as an account taken from ‘autores fidedignos.’ Hist. Mex., i. 353. And with a similar belief it has been given a prominent place in West-vnd Ost-Indischer Lustgart, 131. Gaspar Ens L., the author, was one of the editors of the famous set of De Bry, from which he like so many others borrowed text, if not engravings. The narrator of several individual European travels, he also issued the Indiæ Occidentalis Historia, Coloniæ, 1612. The German version, published at Cöllen in 1618 in a small quarto form, under the above title, has for its guiding principle the appropriate maxim of Horace, Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. The first part, relating to America in general, is divided into three sections, for physical and natural geography and Indian customs, followed by discovery, voyages, and conquests, and concluding with a review of political history, and an appendix on missionary progress. This arrangement, however, is nominal rather than real, and the confusion, extending into chapters as well as sections, is increased by the incomplete and undigested form of the material, enlivened, however, by an admixture of the quaint and wonderful.