would then have the signification, “a built-up place,” or one well stocked with provisions; or, it may be a patronymic from the Tzentals, the tribe which occupied this region at the time, as I shall proceed to show.

The Native Tribe.—There is no question but that the native tribe which took part in this combat belonged to the Mayan stock. All the accounts agree that Aguilar, the Spaniard whom Cortes found in Yucatan as a captive, and who had learned to speak the Mayan tongue, communicated with the natives without difficulty. This is conclusive as to their ethnic position.

Further evidence, if needed, is offered by the native names and words preserved in the accounts. The term for their large canoes, tahucup, is from the Maya tahal, to swim, and kop, that which is hollow, or hollowed out. The name potonchan, Aguilar translated as, “the place that stinks” (lugar que hiede). He evidently understood it as derived from the Maya verb tunhal, to stink, with the intensive prefix pot (which is not unusual in the tongue, as pot-hokan, very evident, etc.). The historian Herrera, on some authority not known to me, further explains this term as one of contempt applied to the people there, meaning rude and barbarous;6-1 as we should say, using the same metaphor, “stinkards.”

Tabasco is said by Bernal Diaz to have been the name of the principal chief of the eight provinces or tribes, who together opposed the Spaniards. For this reason I would reject the derivation from the Nahuatl, proposed by Rovirosa,—tlalli, earth, paltic, wet or swampy, co, in,6-2—however appropriate it would be geographically; and also that from the Maya, tazcoob, “deceived,” referring to the deceptions practiced on the Spaniards,—which is defended by Orozco y Berra6-3; and I should accept that which I find suggested by Dr. Berendt in his manuscript work on Mayan geographical names. He reads Tabasco as a slightly corrupt form of the Maya T’ah-uaxac-coh, “our (or the) master of the eight lions,” referring to the eight districts or gentes of the tribe. This is significant and appropriate, the jaguar, the American lion, being a very common emblem in the ruins of Cintla.

The branch of the Mayan stock which occupied the litoral of the province of Tabasco at that time were those later known as the Tzentals (otherwise spelled Zendal or Tzeltal). By some writers they have been called the Chontals of Tobasco, chontal, as is well known, being merely a common noun in Nahuatl to express foreigners or barbarians. Their identity with the modern Tzentals of Chiápas has been established by the researches of Dr. Berendt.

The Tzental is a dialect closely akin to pure Maya, though it was believed by Dr. Berendt to present nearer relations than the Maya proper to the dialect of the Huastecas, a segregated idiom of the Mayan family, spoken near Tampico.

The Locality.—Until M. Désiré Charnay brought out the results of the Lorillard expedition in his handsome work, “The Ancient Cities of the New World,”6-4 no one, so far as I know, had expressed any doubt that Cintla was situated near the mouth of the great