Huayna Capac had considerably extended the Peruvian empire by the conquest of the kingdom of Quito. In the hope, presumably, of consolidating his conquest, he resided for a long time in the newly-acquired territory, and married the conquered king's daughter, to whom he became passionately attached. This was absolutely contrary to one of the statutes of the Inca family, no member of which was allowed to marry a stranger. By his foreign wife he had a son called Atahualpa, and whether it was that he thought it good policy to allow a certain autonomy to the kingdom of Quito, or whether it was due to his tenderness towards Atahualpa's mother and the son she had borne him, certain it is that when he died at Quito in 1525, he decided that Atahualpa should reign over this newly-acquired kingdom, whilst his other son Huascar, the unimpeachably legitimate Inca, was to succeed him as sovereign of Peru proper. This, again, was a violation of the maxim that the kingdom of the Incas, which was the kingdom of the Sun, was never to be parted. It was in the midst of the struggles provoked by the hostility of the two brothers that Pizarro fell like a meteor amongst the Peruvians, who did not so much as know of the existence of any other land than the one they inhabited. But the hour warns me that I must pause. When next we meet, I shall have to recount the fall of the great religious dynasty of the Incas, and we shall then examine more closely that Peruvian religion of which we have to-day but sketched the outline. LECTURE V. FALL OF THE INCAS.--PERUVIAN MYTHOLOGY, PRIESTHOOD. I. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,