THE POZO STONE. 411 



Another proof of an antiquity older than the Incas is that the 

 ancient Peruvians were noted makers of pottery, made by women's 

 delicate fingers, without the aid of a potter's wheel. This pottery 

 was half baked, much like terra-cotta, many of the specimens found 

 simulate animal and vegetable forms, but the large majority typify 

 the human form. On some of the specimens the fret and scroll, 

 used similarly by the Greeks, are common. The employes of the 

 Peruvian Government, in shipping off the guano from the Chincha 

 Islands, discovered, at different depths, many forms of this pottery, 

 household gods, regal emblems, also a wooden idol, 35 feet under 

 the guano, and a stone idol and several water pots 62 feet under 

 the same deposit. Mr. Hutchinson, the British Vice- Consul in 

 Peru, was so struck with this measure of antiquity that I cannot do 

 better than quote his interesting way of putting the problem. 



" Long, long time before the birds and seals began to accumu- 

 late guano on these Chincha Islands — indeed, so long, that I am 

 almost afraid to guess — the Chincha people must have held sway 

 down here. How many thousand years may have passed — in a 

 case like this it is nonsense to talk of hundreds — since that stone 

 idol was made and worshipped, before it got, by design or accident, 

 in a position that the daily droppings of birds and seals covered it 

 to a depth of sixty-two feet. How many decades have elapsed 

 between this evidence of the stone age and the period of the wooden 

 idol, discovered at a depth of thirty-two feet, or with twenty-seven 

 feet intervening ? Is there any living, calculating Peddar, who 

 could calculate the birds required, and the period occupied, in such 

 an operation."* 



There is still another way of shewing the vast antiquity of 

 these inscribed stones. They are pictorial, the incisions being of 

 the rudest character. Pictorial writing is the most primitive of all 

 writing, a child can draw a man before he can spell so short a word, 

 hence in primal times men symbolized their thoughts by simple 

 outlined pictures. Next arose ideographs, by means of which more 

 complex ideas and even sentiments were expressed. In China the 

 use of written characters dates back 3,000 years B.C., and its use 

 as a perfect system of hieroglyphs by the Egyptians, 5,000 years 

 B.C. "When Cortez and his followers invaded Mexico, they found 



* " Two years in Peru," by Thomas Gr, Hutchinson, Vol. I, p. 104. 



