You will remember that when last we met we traced out the legendary origin of the royal house of the Incas. Starting from the shores of the Lake Titicaca and the city of Cuzco, and progressively extending its combined religious and political dominion over the numerous countries situated west of the Cordilleras, it had welded them into one vast empire, centralized and organized in a way that, in spite of its defects, extorts our admiration. You had occasion to notice the extraordinary degree to which the consummate practical sagacity which distinguished the sacerdotal and imperial family of the Sun for successive centuries, was combined with purely mythological principles of faith; and we were compelled to ask whether so much diplomacy was really consistent with unreserved belief. Finally we saw that, according to the historians, more than one of the Incas had in fact expressed and justified a doubt as to the living and conscious personality of that Sun-god whose descendants they were supposed to be. The position of affairs when the Spaniards disembarked on the shores of Peru is already known to you. The Inca Huayna Capac, conqueror of Quito, had broken with the constitutional maxims of his dynasty, in the first place by marrying a stranger, the daughter of a deposed king; and in the second place by leaving the kingdom of Quito to the son, Atahualpa, whom she bore him; while he allowed Huascar, the heir-apparent to the empire, to succeed him in Peru proper, thus severing into two parts the kingdom of the Sun, in defiance of the principle hitherto recognized, which forbad the division of that kingdom under any circumstances.