cessfully explored the mysterious recesses of Central America and Yucatan.*

I cannot close this analysis of the Peruvian institutions without a few reflections on their general character and tendency, which, if they involve some repetition. of previous remarks, may, I trust, be excused, from my desire to leave a correct and consistent impression on the reader. In this survey we cannot but be struck with the total dissimilarity between these institutions and those of the Aztecs,-the other great nation who led in the march of civilization on this Western continent, and whose empire in the northern portion of it was as conspicuous as that of the Incas in the south. Both nations came on the plateau and commenced their career of conquest at dates, it may be, not far removed from each other.33 And it is worthy of notice that, in America, the elevated region along the crests of the great mountain-ranges should have been the chosen seat of civilization in both hemispheres.

Very different was the policy pursued by the two 33 Ante, chap. I.

[In the foregoing remarks the author has scarcely done justice to the artistic character of the Peruvian architecture, its great superiority to the Mexican, and the resemblances which it offers, in style and development, to the early stages of Greek and Egyptian art. The subject has been fully, and of course very ably, treated by Mr. Fergusson, in his Handbook of Architecture. The Peruvian pottery, which Prescott has passed over with a mere incidental mention, might al❤ have claimed particular notice. Its characteristics are now more familiar, from numerous specimens in public and private collections. For a description of these interesting relics, and a comparison with other remains of ancient ceramic art, see Wilson, Prehistoric Man, chap. 17.-ED.]

races in their military career.

The Aztecs, animated

by the most ferocious spirit, carried on a war of extermination, signalizing their triumphs by the sacrifice of hecatombs of captives; while the Incas, although they pursued the game of conquest with equal pertinacity, preferred a milder policy, substituting negotiation and intrigue for violence, and dealt with their antagonists so that their future resources should not be crippled, and that they should come as friends, not as foes, into the bosom of the empire.

Their policy towards the conquered forms a contrast no less striking to that pursued by the Aztecs. The Mexican vassals were ground by excessive imposts and military conscriptions. No regard was had to their welfare, and the only limit to oppression was the power of endurance. They were overawed by fortresses and armed garrisons, and were made to feel every hour that they were not part and parcel of the nation, but held only in subjugation as a conquered people. The Incas, on the other hand, admitted their new subjects at once to all the rights enjoyed by the rest of the community; and, though they made them conform to the established laws and usages of the empire, they watched over their personal security and comfort with a sort of parental solicitude. The motley population, thus bound together by common interest, was animated by a common feeling of loyalty, which gave greater strength and stability to the empire as it became more and more widely extended; while the various tribes who successively came under the Mexican sceptre, being held together only by the pressure of external force, were ready to fall asunder the moment that that force was withdrawn. The policy

of the two nations displayed the principle of fear as contrasted with the principle of love.

The characteristic features of their religious systems had as little resemblance to each other. The whole Aztec pantheon partook more or less of the sanguinary spirit of the terrible war-god who presided over it, and their frivolous ceremonial almost always terminated with human sacrifice and cannibal orgies. But the rites of the Peruvians were of a more innocent cast, as they tended to a more spiritual worship. For the worship of the Creator is most nearly approached by that of the heavenly bodies, which, as they revolve in their bright orbits, seem to be the most glorious symbols of his beneficence and power.

In the minuter mechanical arts, both showed considerable skill; but in the construction of important public works, of roads, aqueducts, canals, and in agrieulture in all its details, the Peruvians were much superior. Strange that they should have fallen so far below their rivals in their efforts after a higher intellectual culture, in astronomical science more especially, and in the art of communicating thought by visible symbols. When we consider the greater refinement of the Incas, their inferiority to the Aztecs in these particulars can be explained only by the fact that the latter in all probability were indebted for their science to the race who preceded them in the land,-that shadowy race whose origin and whose end are alike veiled from the eye of the inquirer, but who possibly may have sought a refuge from their ferocious invaders in those regions of Central America, the architectural remains of which now supply us with the most pleasir g monuments of Indian

civilization. It is with this more polished race, to whom the Peruvians seem to have borne some resemblance in their mental and moral organization, that they should be compared. Had the empire of the Incas been permitted to extend itself with the rapid trides with which it was advancing at the period of he Spanish conquest, the two races might have come into conflict, or perhaps into alliance, with one another.

The Mexicans and Peruvians, so different in the character of their peculiar civilization, were, it seems probable, ignorant of each other's existence; and it may appear singular that, during the simultaneous continuance of their empires, some of the seeds of science and of art which pass so imperceptibly from one people to another should not have found their way across the interval which separated the two nations. They furnish an interesting example of the opposite directions which the human mind may take in its struggle to emerge from darkness into the light of civilization.*

*[Professor Daniel Wilson, commenting on this passage, remarks that, "whilst there seems little room for doubt that those two nations were ignorant of each other at the period of the discovery of America, there are many indications in some of their arts of an earlier intercourse between the northern and southern continent." (Prehistoric Man, 2d edition, p. 285.) This supposition is connected with a theory put forward by the learned writer in regard to the aboriginal population of America. Rejecting the common opinion of its ethnical unity, he considers the indications as pointing to two, or possibly three, great divisions of race, with as many distinct lines of immigration. He conceives "the earliest current of population" from "a supposed Asiatic cradle land" "to have spread through the islands of the Pacific and to have reached the South American continent long before an excess of Asiatic population had diffused itself into its own inhospitable northern steppes. By an Atlantic Ocean migration, another wave of

A closer resemblance-as I have more than once taken occasion to notice-may be found between the Peruvian institutions and some of the despotic governments of Eastern Asia; those governments where despotism appears in its more mitigated form, and the whole people, under the patriarchal sway of the sovereign, seem to be gathered together like the members of one vast family. Such were the Chinese, for example, whom the Peruvians resembled in their implicit obedience to authority, their mild yet somewhat stubborn temper, their solicitude for forms, their reverence

population occupied the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, and so passed to the Antilles, Central America, and probably by the Cape Verdes, or, guided by the more southern equatorial current, to Brazil. Latest of all, Behring Straits and the North Pacific Islands may have become the highway for a northern migration by which certain striking diversities of nations of the northern continent, including the conquerors of the Mexican plateau, are most easily accounted for." (Ibid., p. 604.) "The north and south tropics were the centres of two distinct and seemingly independent manifestations of native development," but with "clear indications of an overlapping of two or more distinct migratory trails leading from opposite points." (Ibid., p. 602.) It is to be remarked that the novelty of this theory consists, not in any new suggestion to account for the original settlement of America, but in the adoption and symmetrical blending of various conjectures, and the application of them to explain the differences of physical characteristics, customs, development, etc., between the savage and civilized or semi-civilized nations scattered over the continent. The evidence offered in its support does not admit of being summarized here. Elaborate as it is, it will scarcely be considered sufficient to establish the certainty of the general conclusions deduced by the author. On the other hand, his arguments in disproof of a supposed craniological uniformity of type among the American aborigines appear to be irresistible, and to justify the statement that "the form of the human skull is just as little constant among different tribes or races of the New World as of the Old." (Ibid., p. 483.)-ED.]