Some families of Indians, that live in the remote _bolsones_ (small valleys of the Andes), sport even today a cue as the inhabitants of the Celestial empire, and the people in Eten, a small village near Piura, speak a language unknown to their neighbors, and are said to easily hold converse with the coolies of the vicinage. When and how did this intercourse exist, is rather difficult to answer. I am even timorous to insinuate it, lest the believers in the chronology of the Bible, who make the world a little more than 5800 years old, should come down upon me, and, after pouring upon my humble self their most damning anathemas, consign me, at the dictates of their sectarian charity, to that place over the door of which Dante read,-- Perme si vá tra la perduta gente. * * * * * Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’ entrate. And yet mine is not the fault if reason tells me that the climate of Tiahuanaco, situated near the shores of the lake of Titicaca, 13,500 feet above the sea, must not have always been what it is now, otherwise the ground around it, and for many miles barren, would not have been able to support the population of a large city. Today it produces merely a few _ocas_ (a kind of small potato that is preserved frozen), and yields scanty crops of maize and beans. Tiahuanaco _may_, at some distant period, have enjoyed the privilege of being a seaport. Nothing opposes this supposition. On one hand, it is a well-known fact that, owing to the conical motion of the earth, the waters retreat continually from the western coasts of America, which rise at a certain known ratio every century. On the other hand, the bank of oysters and other marine shells and debris, found on the slopes of the Andes to near their summits, obviously indicate that at some time or other the sea has covered them. When was that? I will leave to sectarians to compute, lest the reckoning should carry us back to that time when the space between Tiahuanaco and Easter Island was dry land, and the valleys and plains now lying under the waters of the Pacific swarmed with industrious, intelligent human beings, were strewn with cities and villas, yielded luxuriant crops to the inhabitants, and the figure should show that people lived there before the creation of the world. I recoil with horror at the mere idea of being even suspected of insinuating such an heretical doctrine.