104 Peruvian Antiquities. [January, 
globe ten times. Surprising as these estimates may seem, 
I am fully convinced that an actual measurement would 
more than double them, for these ravines vary from 30 to 
100 miles in length, and 10 miles to each is a low estimate. 
While at San Mateo, a town in the valley of the River 
Rimac, 77 miles from the coast, where the mountains rise 
to a height of 1500 or 2000 feet above the river bed, I 
counted two hundred tiers, none of which were less than 
four and many more than six miles long. Even at four miles 
there would be at that point alone 800 miles of stone wall, 
and that only on one side of the ravine. 
Who, then, were these people, cutting through 60 miles 
of granite, transplanting blocks of hard porphyry, of Baal- 
bic dimensions, miles from the place where quarried, across 
valleys thousands of feet deep, over mountains, along plains, 
leaving no trace of how or where they carried them ; people 
ignorant of the use of iron, with the feeble llama their only 
beast of burden ; who, after having brought these stones 
together and dressed them, fitted them into walls with 
mosaic precision ; terracing thousands of miles of mountain 
side ; building hills of adobes and earth, and huge cities ; 
leaving works in clay, stone, copper, silver, gold, and em- 
broidery, many of which cannot be duplicated at the present 
age; people apparently vying with Dives in riches, Hercules 
in strength and energy, and the ant and bee in industry ? 
Callao was submerged in 1746, and entirely destroyed. 
Lima was ruined in 1678 ; in 1746 only twenty houses out 
of three thousand were left standing, and again injured in 
1764, 1822, and 1828, while the ancient cities in the Huatica 
and Lurin valleys still remain in a comparatively good state 
of preservation. San Miguel de Piura, founded by Pizarro 
in 153 r, was entirely destroyed in 1855, while the old ruins 
near by suffered little. Arequipa was thrown down in August, 
1868, but the ruins near show no change. 
Spanish writers refer all to Incal make, but Incal history 
only dates back to the eleventh century, and from that time 
to the Conquest is insufficient, nor do they speak of many of 
these works. It is granted that the Temple of the Sun, at 
Cuzco, was of Incal make, but that is the latest of the five 
styles of architecture visible in the Andes, each probably 
representing an age of human progress ; therefore we are 
pretty certain that the imperial glories of the Incas were 
but the last gleam of civilisation that mounted up to 
thousands of years; that long before Manco Capac, the 
Andes had been the dwelling-place of races whose begin- 
nings must have been coeval with the savages of Western 
