296 COSMOS. 



The age of the Conqii'ista, which ccmprises the eni of the 

 fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, indicates 

 a remarkable concurrence of great events in the pohtical and 

 social life of the nations of Europe. In the same month m 

 which Hernan Cortez, after the battle of Otumba, advanced 

 upon Mexico, with the view of besieging it, Martin Luther 

 burned the pope's bull at Wittenberg, and laid the foundation 

 of the Reformation, which promised to the human mind both 

 freedom and progress on paths which had hitherto been almost 

 wholly untrodden.* Still earlier, the noblest forms of ancient 

 Hellenic art, the Laocoon, the Torso, the Apollo de Belvidere, 

 and the Medicean Venus, had been resuscitated, as it were, 

 from the tombs in which they had so long been buried. 

 There flourished in Italy, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, 

 Titian, and Raphael ; and in Germany, Holbein and Albert 

 Durer. The Copernican system of the universe was discov- 

 ered, if not made generally known, in the year in Vv'hich Co- 

 lumbus died, and fourteen years after the discovery of the 

 New Continent. 



The importance of this discovery, and of the first coloniza 

 tion of Europeans, involves a consideration of other fields of 

 inquiry besides those to which these pages are devoted, and 

 closely bears upon the intellectual and moral influences exei 

 cised on the improvement of the social condition of mankind 

 by the sudden enlargement of the accumulated mass of new 

 ideas. We would simply draw attention to the fact that, 



clie mountainous parts of Quito, Peru, and Chili. These herds consti 

 tuted the riches of the nations who were settled there, and were engag- 

 ed in the cultivation of the soil ; in the Cordilleras of South America 

 there were no " pastoral nations," and " pastoral life" was not known. 

 What are the " tame deer," near the Punta de St. Helena, which are 

 mentioned in Herrera, Dec. ii., lib. x., cap. 6 (t. i., p. 471, ed. Amberes, 

 1728) ? These deer are said to have given milk and cheese, *' ciervos 

 que dan leche y queso y se crian en casa!^' From what source is thia 

 notice taken ? It can not have arisen from a confusion with the llamas 

 (having neither horns nor antlers) of the cold mountainous region, of 

 which Gai'cilaso affirms that in Peru, and especially on the plateau of 

 Callao, they were used for plowing. (Comment reales, Part i., lib. v., 

 cap. 2, p. 133. Compare, also, Pedro de Cie9a de Leon. Chronica del 

 Peru, Sevilla, 1553, cap. 110, p. 264.) This employment of llamas ap- 

 pears, however, to have been a rare exception, and a merely local 

 custom. In general, the American races were remaikable for their 

 deticiency of domesticated animals, and this had a profound influence 

 on family life. 



* On the hone which Luther, in the execution of his great and freo 

 minded work, placed especially on the younger generation the youtb 

 of Germany, see the remarkable expressions in a etter written in Junr, 

 l.'ilS. (Neai\(ler, Z>e V'iceZio, p. 7.) 



