It is to the honor of Peru that the government, recognizing the importance of exploring its great treasure-store of antiquities in the interest of modern knowledge, is directing a systematic effort to penetrate the veil of mystery which envelopes the remote past of the country and its people. Dr. Max Uhle, an eminent authority on Peruvian archæology, is now occupied in the work of excavating and classifying Peruvian antiquities in accordance with modern scientific methods. The facts so far accumulated from reliable archæological data point to an antiquity of at least three thousand years, and may indicate a much more remote period of culture. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE PRINCIPAL PALACE OF PACHACÁMAC.] Long ages before the New World was discovered by Europeans, and centuries before the Incas established their wonderful empire, Peru was the home of a mighty race, or of successive races, whose dominion extended at some time over a great part of tropical America. The records of their advancement still exist in the stupendous ruins of their sacred temples and in the objects of art and evidences of culture found in their burial mounds. Like the various nations of the Orient, these ancients of the New World had their ambitious struggles for supremacy one against another, their periods of great prosperity and power,—sometimes arriving at the height of despotic rule over all contemporaries,—and their time of decline before the ascendancy of a more potent rival. The record of changes wrought in successive periods, and of influences resulting from communication between the inhabitants of widely separated regions, is written in their monuments and in the huacas of their cemeteries, and furnishes the key to the chronology of prehistoric Peru, possibly to all American antiquity. [Illustration: THE EASTERN STREET OF PACHACÁMAC.]