Aboriginal Race of America. 149 
became transformed into the wily and merciless savage. 
Every one is familiar with the sequel. Resistance was too 
late to be availing, and the fetters to which they had con- 
fidingly submitted were soon rivetted for ever. 
As we have already observed, the Incas depressed the 
moral energies of their subjects in order to secure their own 
power. This they effected by inculcating the arts of peace, 
prohibiting human sacrifices, and in a great measure avoiding 
capital punishments ; and blood was seldom spilt excepting 
on the subjugation of warlike and refractory tribes. In these 
instances, however, the native ferocity of their race broke 
forth even in the bosom of the Incas; for we are told by 
Garcilaso, the descendant and apologist of the Peruvian kings, 
that some of their wars were absolutely exterminating; and 
among other examples he mentions that of the Inca Yupanqui 
against the province of Collao, in which whole districts were 
so completely depopulated, that they had subsequently to 
be colonized from other parts of the empire: and in another 
instance the same unsparing despot destroyed twenty thou- 
sand Caranques, whose bodies he ordered to be thrown into an 
adjacent lake, which yet bears the name of the Sea of Blood. 
In like manner, when Atahualpa contested the dominion with 
Guascar, he caused the latter, together with thirty of his 
brothers, to be put to death in cold blood, that nothing might 
impede his progress to the throne. 
We have thus endeavoured to shew, that the same moral 
traits characterize all the aboriginal nations of this continent, 
from the humanized Peruvian to the rudest savage of the 
Brazilian forest. 
_ 8. Intellectual Faculties.—lt has often been remarked, that 
the intellectual faculties are distributed with surprising equa- 
lity among individuals of the same race who have been simi- 
larly educated, and subjected to the same moral and other in- 
fluences: yet even among these, as in the physical man, we 
_ see the strong and the weak, with numberless intermediate 
gradations. ‘This equality is infinitely more obvious in sa- 
vage than in civilized communities, simply, because in the 
former the condition of life is more equal; whence it hap- 
