KING, Edward Viscount Kingsborough, Irish writer and archeologist: b. 1795; d. 1837. He was the eldest son of the third earl of Kingston and was educated at Oxford. Leav ing college he became a member of Parliament' (1818-26); but after eight years of public life he resigned his seat in favor of his brother, who took a great deal more interest in politics than did the elder member of the family who had already become a confirmed antiquarian, deeply attracted toward the ancient civilizations of Mexico. In fact Kingsborough, as he is usually called, is one of the most interesting of all the collectors of the remains of the ancient Mexican civilizations. After several years spent in the work of examining and collecting the Aztecs and other manuscripts of the pre Columbian Mexican civilization, he began, in 1830, the publication of his monumental work on The Antiquities of Mexico,' which was gradually issued in London in nine superb volumes, profusely illustrated. No author prob ably in all history has accomplished so much in a direction he was not consciously working ad Kingsborough. He set out with the inten tion of proving that the people of Mexico were of Jewish origin and the descendants of the lost 10 tribes of Israel. To this all his acute reasoning, his undoubted erudition and his en thusiasm combined with hiS diligence were directed. From all the libraries of the Old and the New World he collected manuscripts and codices and other remains of pre-Columbian. life supplemented with other documents follow-. ing the conquest of Mexico. All the docu mentary material in the form of codices and several most valuable documents of post-con quest days, he included in his publications, the codices being reproduced in color at an enor mous expense. In fact so great was the cost of collection, examination and publication of this material that it exhausted Kingsborough's fortune, and he was arrested by his printer and cast into a debtor's prison in Dublin where he died of typhus contracted in what was then one of the most insanitary prisons of the British domains. Among the valuable texts published in Kingsborough's work is the 'History of New Spain) by Sahagun, which is the most fruitful and interesting of the existing documentary evidence of the pre-Columbian civilization of Mexico and Central America, with perhaps the one exception of the existing codices relating to pre-conquest fexico. Kingsborough's work
was looked upon as a marVel of the printer's and engraver's art in his day; and the present generation is little inclined to dispute this esti mate, when the circumstances under which it was executed are taken into account. How costly and on what a grand scale the work was done may be gathered from the fact that, though the edition with colored plates sold for £175 and the uncolored for f120, yet the author came far from meeting the expenses incurred in its production. 'The Mexican is a storehouse of material and documents relating to native Mexican civilization, and is for this reason invaluable to the student of this period in the history of America and of the civilization of the western hemisphere. But there is little order in the arrangement of the contents of the work which contain the com paratively few interpretations of the manu scripts existing in Kingsborough's time. The author has added copious notes of his own, which lose a great part of their authority and effectiveness owing to the fact that he bent every argument and investigation to prove his theory of the Jewish origin of the Mexican people. Thus his erudition and his industry run too often to waste. His work itself is generally in a disorder bordering on chaos and his notes and explanations are frequently tiresome, for this reason and the fact that he intrudes every where, in the most serious discussion, his pet theory. Yet so great is the amount of valuable material of a past age that he has brought within reach of the student and the antiquarian, that the world of science readily acknowledges its debt to him; for in presenting the civilization of pre-conquest Mexico he has furnished docu mentary evidence and material for the investi gator into all the civilizations of America in the ages preceding the middle of the 16th century. Consult Bancroft, 'Native Races' ; Kings borough, 'Mexican ; Prescott, 'Conquest of Mexico.)