OCCIDENTAL STOCK. 317 



the tradition respecting the origin of the Peruvian empire. The aborigines 

 were rude, independent tribes, wandering in the forests, without any fixed 

 residence, or bonds of social union ; naked and ignorant ; when there 

 appeared on the banks of the Lake Titicaca, a man and woman of ma- 

 jestic form, clothed with garments, who declared themselves the children 

 of the sun, sent to instruct them. Manco Capac, and Mama Ocollo, for 

 such were their names, became their lawgivers, and founded the Peruvian 

 empire. Their successors were termed Incas.* The appearance of 

 Manco Capac may be understood as figurative of the invasion and usurp- 

 ation of the country by a colony of comparatively civilized people, who 

 settled themselves, overawed or subdued the aborigines, extended their 

 conquests, and established the Peruvian empire. 



Acknowledging the probability of the Malay origin of the civilizers of 

 Mexico and Peru, the founders of those empires which were overthrown 

 by the sanguinary and avaricious Spaniards, it is nevertheless plain, that 

 an indigenous race occupied the soil when they first landed upon it, and 

 commenced their infant colonies : with this race, doubtless, they became 

 more or less intermixed, and, while spreading the benefits of a certain 

 degree of civilization around them, gradually adopted the language of the 

 indigenes, or engrafted it upon their own. Certain established customs of 

 the old possessors of the land would be retained in the midst of improve- 

 ments, and in spite of attempts to suppress them ; and hence the practice 

 of flattening the skull, during infancy (a practice widely diffused), would 

 not only be continued by the indigenes, but might even be adopted by the 

 mixed descendants of these and the foreign colonizers, the pure race of 

 whom would be preserved only in the royal line, as was said to have been 

 the case in the line of the Incas. 



Leaving, however, this hypothesis of the origin of the ancient Mexican 

 and Peruvian empires, as one rather of probability than as based upon 

 any tangible grounds, it remains now to investigate the general characters 

 of the original inhabitants of the New World, adopting the three primary 

 divisions instituted by M. Bory : 



COLUMBIAN BRANCH. Notwithstanding the influx of Europeans, of 



and conducted in war, by such as were entitled to pre-eminence by their wisdom or their valour. But 

 among them, as in other states, whose power and territories became extensive, the supreme authority 

 centred, at last, in a single person ; and when the Spaniards, under Cortes, invaded the country, Mon- 

 tezuma was the ninth monarch in order, who had swayed the Mexican sceptre, not by hereditary right, 

 but by election. From the first migration of their parent tribe, they can reckon little more than 300 

 years (i. e. to the invasion of the Spaniards). From the establishment of monarchical government, 

 not above 130 years, according to one account, or 179, according to another computation." Robertson's 

 History of America. 



* The Incas continued to rule in succession for twelve generations, till the year 1526. The 

 twelfth Inca, Huanco Capac, subdued Quito, and married the daughter of the monarch of that province, 

 and, after his death, a civil war between the son of Huanco Capac, by a mother of the Incas line, and 

 a son by the daughter of the monarch of Quito, raged with great fury ; but, opportunely for Pizarro, 

 whose second landing took place at this juncture. 



