102 CRANIA AMERICANA. 



singular circumstance that the maize, or Indian corn, so left, was different from 

 any that now existed in the country." 



Mr. Pentland expresses his decided opinion " that the extraordinary forms 

 thus brought to the light of day after their long sojourn, could not be attributed 

 to pressure, or any external force, similar to that still employed by many American 

 tribes ; and adduced, in confirmation of this view, the opinions of Cuvier, of Gall, 

 and of many other naturalists and anatomists. On these grounds he was of opinion 

 that they constituted the population of these elevated regions before the arrival of 

 the present Indian population, which in its physical characters, customs, &c., 

 offers many analogies with the Asiatic population of the old world."* 



The preceding facts appear to establish two important propositions; first, that 

 the primitive Peruvians had attained to a considerable degree of civilisation and 

 refinement, so far at least as architecture and sculpture may be adduced in 

 evidence, long before the Incas appeared in their country ; and secondly, that these 

 primitive Peruvians were the same people whose elongated and seemingly brutalised 

 crania now arrest our attention ; and it remains to inquire, whether these are the 

 same people whom the Incas found in possession of Peru, or whether their nation 

 and power were already extinct at that epoch ? 



The modern Peruvian empire had existed upwards of four hundred years at 

 the time of the Spanish conquest, so that its origin may be dated somewhere 

 about the year 1100 of our era. Now it appears that among the first military 

 enterprises of this new family was the conquest of CoUao, which possessed a 

 productive soil and a warlike population, and embraced within its confines the 

 Lake Titicaca, from which the Incas pretended to have derived a supernatural 

 origin. Every effort was therefore made to subdue and to destroy the Collas. 

 The Inca Yupanque waged against them a war of extermination ; and we are told 

 by Herrera that in some of the towns he left so few persons alive, that inhabitants 

 were afterwards sent from other parts of Peru to colonise the wasted districts-f 

 The same historian adds, that in order further to depopulate the country, the 

 inhabitants were banished from it in large bodies, and dispersed through other 

 provinces of the empire; and yet such was the dread in which the new dynasty 

 held these warlike people, that they forbade more than a thousand of them to 



* Report of the Fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, p. 

 624; and Additional Reports, which were republished in Waldie's Journal of Belles-Lettres, 1834. 

 t Historia de las Indias, Dec. Ill, Lib. IX, c. 4. 



