representatives of a commercial currency as the feathers of the coraquenque, which were reserved exclusively for the decoration of royalty. The Peruvians occupied a long extent of sea-coast, but no commercial enterprise tempted them to launch their navies on the Pacific, excepting for the most partial coasting transit. The great mass of the people patiently wrought to produce from their varied tropical climates and fertile soil the agricultural produce on which the entire community depended; resembling in this, as well as in the vast structures wrought by a patiently submissive people at the will of their absolute rulers, the great oriental despotisms when in their earliest and least licentious forms. Their own traditions traced the dawn of their government no further back than the twelfth century; and the characteristics of their imperfect and unequally developed civilisation confirm the inference that they have not in this respect departed from the invariable tendency of historic myth and tradition to exaggerate the national age. Extensive ruins still existing on the shores of Lake Titicaca are affirmed by the Peruvians to have existed before the Incas arrived. But slight importance can be attached to the traditions of an unlettered people concerning events of any kind dating four or five centuries back. The authority of Bede is of little value relative to Jute or Anglo-Saxon colonisation less than three centuries before his time; and the modern New Englander, with deeds and parchments, as well as abundance of printed history to help his tradition, cannot make up his mind as to whether the famous Newport Round Tower was built by a Norse viking of the eleventh, or a New England miller of the seventeenth century. “No account,” says Prescott, “assigns to the Inca dynasty more than thirteen princes before the Conquest. But this number is altogether too small to have spread over four hundred years, and would not carry back the foundations of the monarchy, on any probable computation, beyond two centuries and a half—an antiquity not incredible in itself, and which, it may be remarked, does not precede by more than half a century the alleged foundation of the capital of Mexico.” Humboldt, in his _Vues des Cordillères_, indicates the borders of Lake Titicaca, the district of Callao, and the high plains of Tiahuanaco, as the theatre of ancient American civilisation; and Prescott, in view of the apparently recent origin of the Incas, assumes that they were preceded in Peru by another civilised race, which, in conformity with native traditions, he would derive from this same cradle-land of South American arts. Beyond this, however, he does not attempt to penetrate into that unchronicled past. Who this people were, and whence they came, may afford a tempting theme for inquiry to the speculative ethnologist; but it is a land of darkness lying beyond the domain of history. The same mists that hang