1st. The annals of South America, where many generalities will be introduced, that need not be repeated in the 2d series, on the annals of North America. 3d. Illustrations of these outlines, where will be thrown and collected all the collateral proofs, documents, vocabularies of languages, manuscript facts and events, essential quotations, and results of all the investigations. The Peruvian and Austral regions of South America will first be introduced, because of paramount importance. By the Peruvian region is meant the whole western part of South America from the equator to the southern tropic, and by Austral America, the whole of it from that tropic to the Magellanic Islands. The gulf of Rio Plata and the river Paraguay, appear to divide these regions from Brazil, both physically and historically. Austral America includes the countries and nations of Chili, Tucuman, Chaco, Buenos Ayres, Patagonia and Magellania; but it shall often be needful to mention their neighbors, with whom they are more or less related, and even distant nations that are not always strangers to them. The ancient nations of Austral America are the least known on many accounts, and those on whom most fables and systems have been based. It is there that dwell the _Patagons_, who have been believed a peculiar species of giants; and those tribes of Chaco, &c., which Azara has deemed peculiar men, with languages without affinities with any other: which will easily be proved to be quite false. If America has had an aboriginal population, or _Autoctons_, men born from the soil: it is there they should be found, driven to the south and those remote climes by the ancient colonies of other nations; and they should offer features, complexions, languages and manners totally different from any other. If all the Americans derive from ancient colonies, it is still there that ought to be found the primitive tribes, driven on by the subsequent colonies and tribes. Therefore these Austral tribes are exceedingly interesting to study as the most ancient relics of American population. But the origin of the American nations and tribes are only to be considered as a branch of their history. The accounts of their dispersion and successive settlements, the history of the events which they have remembered and transmitted to us by traditions or annals, those of the empires which have been founded there in ancient and modern times, the study of their civilization and ethnography ... offer surely much more interest, and a wide field of historical facts or enquiries.