The tellers of Peru’s story deserve a history themselves. First came the falcon-eyed missionaries of Spain, sword and rosary clattering beneath priestly robes, to subject the Indians to salvation, or mercifully to condemn them to death by torture. Had they been less conscientious in describing all those quaint beliefs and idolatrous practices which they came to stamp out, we should perhaps have missed the chief source of information in regard to the Children of the Sun and their dependent peoples. Military writers and official chroniclers followed in close order. It took them some time to recover from their amazement at this land of “gold, silver and pleasant monkeys.” They wrote with convincing emphasis, “Wee that live now at Peru ... finde not ourselves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward and our feete on high.” On the contrary, they discovered that they were even “as near unto heaven at Peru as in Spain.” Explorers and adventurers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were in the forefront of writers of romance. Such authors have always found inspiration here. From Marmontel to the _Peruvian Tales_ of Guenelette, from Frank Stockton to José-Maria de Heredia, chiseler of faultless cameos, who himself came from a dramatic land of Spanish conquest, Peru has been a word to conjure with. But invention has added no glamour to history. It cannot keep pace with fact. Accounts by various travelers of past centuries, voyages of discovery and reports of treasure fleets are followed by the students of to-day. Scientists write of Peru, each authority finding his specialty accented. The geologist sees cosmic forces in active operation still. The anthropologist studies untouched savages in the morasses of the Amazon, the naturalist’s wonderland. Archeology now has an exciting preëminence. Cool authorities admit the amazing antiquity of Peruvian ruins. The historian finds a great barbaric civilization; the economist ancient systems of state policy; the prospector an extensive system of navigable waterways. The mining engineer discovers inexhaustible mines, and the agriculturist unique opportunity, where the uplands of a farm lie among snows, its lowlands under rubber groves and orange trees. All write of Peru, and an increasing bibliography affords easy access to every sort of statistics. I have referred to a wide range of authorities, many of them cited in an appendix, to supplement my own observations, made as member of an astronomical expedition, during a stay of several months in Peru. * * * * * A painstaking person while in Peru wrote a journal containing all he saw. Not an event or an observation escaped chronicle. But on reaching home he discovered that his really poignant memories were not in his journal. His entries, though conscientious, “were but the ingredients. They were not the secret of the philtre.”