8 26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



evening, passed tinder the earth, and reappeared twelve hours" 

 afterward in the opposite part of the horizon. 



The god himself was represented in sculpture, according to M. 

 Wiener, in statues of gold or reddish-brown porphyry, with " his 

 forehead encircled by the royal fillet in the midst of four fabulous 

 animals moving around him." The same author, on the evidence 

 of some monuments resembling the menhirs of the Druids, gives 

 another explanation of the circular motion of the sun. " It is re- 

 garded/' he says, " as a being which comes to rest at night after its 

 daily march, in the inaccessible inclosure of the sanctuary (called 

 by a Quichua term signifying the place to which the sun is at- 

 tached). The holy object consists of two granite blocks about a 

 metre in height, on the inner faces of which have been found 

 holes about fifteen centimetres deep and nine centimetres in diame- 

 ter." This was narrow quarters for a star as voluminous as the 

 sun ! We shall find further on that M. Wiener gives the same 

 name to a system of observatories. The illustrious Peruvianolo- 

 gist has confused this word with the identical one which represents 

 the year in the Quichua language. 



The earth was believed to be flat and circular, and the center 

 of it was shown in the sanctuary of Cuzco, the name of which, ac- 

 cording to Garcilaso, signifies umbilicus, or navel. The Greeks 

 had a similar belief, and located the center of the earth in the 

 Temple of Apollo, another solar deity, at Delphi, which they called 

 "O/t^oAos, the navel of the inhabited world. It is celebrated under 

 that title in some of the Pythian odes of Pindar. The earth, the 

 Indian name of which signified " everywhere," was the only one 

 of the stars that had no sanctuary in the Temple of the Sun. Like 

 the peoples of the Aryan race, the Incas did not suspect that it 

 was endowed with motion. Only the revolution of the stars ex- 

 isted to them ; and the earth, instead of being a planet suspended 

 in space, gravitating round the sun, and turning upon itself, was 

 supposed to be fixed in the midst of a moving celestial sphere. 



When the moon was eclipsed the Incas supposed that it was 

 ill, and uneasiness prevailed whenever it appeared obscured. If 

 the eclipse was total, they supposed that the star was perhaps 

 dead, and that, not being capable of maintaining itself in space, it 

 would fall to the earth, crushing the poor mortals thereon and 

 that the world would come to an end. For this reason when an 

 eclipse of the moon was beginning an event they were not able 

 to predict the Incas with such instruments as were within their 

 reach drums, trumpets, cymbals, etc. made a frightful noise, 

 and, tying up their dogs, tormented them so as to extort the most 

 hideous cries from them, in the hope that the moon, being a 

 friend of dogs, would be softened by their howling and try to re- 

 turn to life. Men, women, and children joined with their princes 



