THE HUMAN SPECIES. 257 



intellectual powers of the aboriginal races had already 

 attained, without the intervention of European science. 

 Writers, in general, more dazzled with Mexican splen- 

 dour, because that empire was more within reach of 

 European curiosity, have not regarded Peru with suffi- 

 cient discrimination, perhaps because its splendour and 

 civilization was more suddenly and more universally 

 trodden down by the European monsters who invaded 

 it; and fewer documents of its condition have come 

 down to our time. But the nation which had advanced 

 to the established practice of bloodless sacrifice in its 

 worship, had surely gone far beyond the Mexicans; 

 and although we do not know how much of scientific 

 progress was the property of one or of both the two 

 empires, the bas-relief carving already mentioned, where 

 the sun is represented in the centre of the system, with 

 other planets in the irradiated circle around it, shows, 

 that children of the sun, though they claimed them- 

 selves to be, had a better notion of the planetary dis- 

 position than Europeans possessed to a late period; 

 and that the superior men of the nation were not 

 blinded by the solar dogmas of their religion, is proved 

 by the memorable reply of Ynca Tupac Yupan-gui 

 to the monk Valverde, wherein he rejected the belief, 

 that the sun was a living body, creating all things, 

 but thought him to be " like an arrow which per- 

 forms the flight intended by the archer who shot it 

 oif." The Peruvians of history appear to have been a 

 partial compound of naturally flat-headed Paltas, and a 

 mixture, probably, of the dominant tribes, with partly 



