Mr. Squier, as we have seen, gives no countenance to baseless speculations, and the publication of his book has, it is evident, fallen on them as a heavy blow and great discouragement. The preciseness of his details gives a force and authority to both his statements and opinions which cannot easily be evaded or resisted even by those most given to substituting assumptions for evidence and facts. His descriptions of the stone-work of the ancient Peruvians are not likely to suggest to unsophisticated readers an identity of race and institutions with the inhabitants of wigwams. "The joints are all of a precision unknown in our architecture, and not rivalled in the remains of ancient art that had fallen under my notice in Europe. The statement of the old writers, that the accuracy with which the stones of some structures were fitted together was such that it was impossible to introduce the thinnest knife-blade or finest needle between them, may be taken as strictly true. The world has nothing to show in the way of stone-cutting and fitting to surpass the skill and accuracy displayed in the Indian structures of Cuzco. All modern work of the kind there--and there are some fine examples of skill--looks rude and barbarous in comparison." We may imagine the straits to which the advocates of Lo are driven when they point to the absence of mortar or cement of any kind in such walls as a proof of rudeness and ignorance in the builders. But, as Mr. Squier reminds us, Humboldt found a true mortar in the ruins of Pullal and Canuar, in Northern Peru. Humboldt found, too, in the same region the remains of paved roads not inferior to any Roman roads which he had seen in Italy, France or Spain; and though Mr. Squier states that few traces of such roads now exist in the southern part of the country, and infers that they never existed here, since "the modern pathways must follow the ancient lines," and "there is no reason why they should have suffered more from time and the elements in one part of the country than in another," it seems to us impossible to reject in so summary a fashion the testimony of early writers, given, not in mere general terms, but with a minuteness of description rivalling his own. Possibly, the explanation may be found partly in the fact that the roads in one part of the country were generally more ancient than in the other--many of them, as we know, dating from a period anterior to the Inca rule--and partly to the greater devastations wrought by the European conquerors and their descendants in the neighborhood of the capital and on the most frequented routes. In other particulars, such as the size of the Peruvian houses and the existence of windows, Mr. Squier finds the facts to have been understated by Humboldt. Generally, as we have already intimated, he finds full confirmation of the accounts of such writers as Cieza de Leon and Garcilasso de la Vega in those relics which still