Note 2 — BIBLIOGRAPHY

The above system of reference to documents in the Archive of the Indies is used universally, and it has been employed consistently in this treatise. The manuscripts are wrapped and tied in bundles (legajos), which, in turn, are to be found in large cases (estantes), and the shelves (cajones) of the cases are numbered. The meaning of the above reference therefore is Estante 68, Cajón 6, Legajo 3, indicating that legajo number 3 is to be found on Shelf 6 of Case 68 of the Archive. A legajo contains in the neighborhood of 2,000 pages of hand-written manuscript. The documents may be originals, certified copies or ordinary drafts or duplicates. They are supposed to be grouped according to subject-matter, and usually the materials in a given cajón deal with a phase of the same question. Legajos in a given cajón and manuscripts in a given legajo, roughly speaking, are arranged chronologically, though in many cases they have lost their original order owing to careless handling. This description is sufficient to identify any document to which this classification is applied, as these numbers are not duplicated, though often the documents are, and copies of the same manuscript may be found in different cajones.