159 



melting gold and copper, and of mixing the 

 latter metal with tin to make cutting instru- 

 ments*, was known. What is the cause of this 

 contrast between the temperate and the torrid 

 zone? The incas of Peru had pushed their 

 conquests and their religious wars as far as the 

 banks of the Napo and the Amazon, where 

 their language extended over a small space of 

 land ; but the civilization of the Peruvians, the 

 inhabitants of Quito, and the Muyscas of New 

 Grenada, never appears to have had any sensible 

 influence on the moral state of the nations of 

 Guyana. It must be observed farther, that in 

 North America, between the Ohio, Miami, and 

 the Lakes, an unknown people, whom system- 

 atic authors would make the descendants of the 

 Toltecks and Aztecks, constructed walls of earth, 

 and sometimes of stone without mortar^, from 

 ten to fifteen feet high, and seven or eight thou- 

 sand feet long. These problematical circum- 

 vallations sometimes enclosed a hundred and 

 fifty acres of ground. In the plains of the Oroo- 

 noko, as in those of Marietta, the Miami, and 

 the Ohio, the centre of an ancient civilization is 

 found in the west on the back of the moun- 



* New Spain, vol. ii, p. 485. 

 + Of siliceous limestone, at Pique, on the Great Miami 5 

 of sandstone at Creek Point, ten leagues from Chillakothe, 

 where the wall is fifteen hundred toises long. Drake, 

 p. 212. 



