THE HUMAN SPECIES. 275 



already attained, without the intervention of European science. 

 Writers, in general, more dazzled with Mexican splendor, 

 because that empire was more within reach of European curi- 

 osity, have not regarded Peru with sufficient discrimination; 

 perhaps because its splendor 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 disposition 

 than Europeans possessed to a late period; and that the 

 superior men of the nation were not blinded by the solar dog- 

 mas of their religion, is proved by the memorable reply of Inca 

 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 performs the flight 

 intended by the archer who shot it off." 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 artificial-flattened occiputs; but the figures 

 of Incas, preserved in early Spanish documents, offer neither 

 of these deformities. The first were, most likely, the working 

 castes, the second the privileged, and the last appears to have 

 been confined to one sacred family. Cyclopean structures,*' or 

 walls, fortifications, and pyramidal elevations, raised with 

 enormous stones, belong, certainly, to the oldest population. 



* Such as Chulucanas, on a secondary ridge of the Cordilleras, as well 

 as pyramidal instances of tombs. 



