courage and perseverance they infallibly drive him off. His retreat is succeeded by a return of the obstructed light.

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Something of the same kind is practiced by the Chippewas, at this time, when an eclipse happens. The belief among them is that there is a battle between the sun and moon, which intercepts the light. Their great object, therefore, is to stop the fighting and separate the combatants. They think these ends can be accomplished by withdrawing the attention of the contending parties from each other, and diverting it to the Chippewas themselves. They accordingly fill the air with noise and outcry. Such sounds are sure to attract the attention of the warring powers. Their philosophers have the satisfaction of knowing that the strife never lasted long after their clamor and noisy operations had begun. Being thus induced to be peaceful, the sun and moon separate, and light is restored to the Chippewas.

"Now it is reported, on the authority of one of the Jesuit fathers of the French mission to India, that a certain tribe or people whom he visited there ascribed eclipses to the presence of a great dragon. This creature, by the interposition of his huge body, obstructs the passage of the light to our world. They were persuaded that they could drive him away by all the terrific sounds they could produce. These were always successful. The dragon retired in alarm and the eclipse immediately terminated."

In each month of the year the Peruvians held feasts, but the principal ones related to the Sun, and they celebrated the solstices and the equinoxes. The most solemn of all was the summer solstice.

This feast was in token of gratitude and thankfulness for the benefits which the nation enjoyed, and was solemnized throughout all the countries governed by the Incas. There were assembled at it the chiefs and princes of the empire; those who could not attend sent their sons or relatives, with the most noble lords of the territory. The multitude was innumerable. From the neighboring provinces women were sent to dress the food of the multitudes, and chiefly to knead a species of cake of boiled corn, called zancu, and eaten only at the solemn feasts. The feast was preceded by three days of religious fasting, during which time. the only food consisted of a little white raw corn and a certain herb called chucan. At the same time no fire was permitted to be kindled in any house. The first sacrifice consisted generally of a young black llama. The priest opened with the sacred knife the left side and tore out the heart, with the lungs and throat, and found an omen for the future.

The augural holocaust over, the priest made a general sacrifice to the Sun, which consisted of a large number of llamas and alpacas, which they beheaded, offering their hearts to the Sun, and burning the entrails of the victims until they were reduced to ashes, and the flesh was roasted and dressed, with other food.

The second principal feast, called Situa, was solemnized at the autumnal equinox, and was preceded by a feast, which took place the day of the new moon before the fast. The night before, they prepared in all the houses zancus, a portion of which was mixed with human blood, taken from children five or six years. old by means of a sharp-pointed stone. A few hours before breakfast all those who had fasted washed themselves and took a little of the potion, mixed with blood, rubbing with it their whole body, in order to dissipate all infirmities. With the same material the head of each house rubbed the thresholds, leaving a part stuck there, in commemoration. In the royal palace the oldest uncle of the king performed this ceremony, and in the temples of the Sun the High Priest, and other priests, deputed for that purpose, in the other sacred houses.

Upon the rising of the sun the people assembled in the designated squares to adore the deity, entreating it to expel all evils and infirmities. Then, at an hour appointed, on the morrow, there came out of the fortress Sacsahuaman (at Cuzco) an Inca as a messenger of the Sun, richly arrayed, his mantle girded to his body, a lance, with a little banner of feathers, in his hand, and ran until he reached the middle of the principal square, where he was waited for by four Incas similarly clothed. Upon reaching them he touched their lances with his, telling them that the Sun commanded that they should expel from the city and its environs all ills and infirmities. At the same time the four Incas departed for the four quarters of the globe by the four royal roads which proceeded from this square, and ran a quarter of a league to a spot where others were waiting for them, already prepared to continue the service; and in this manner, their places re-occupied by fresh substitutes, they traversed the road for six leagues beyond the city in the four principal directions, the Incas keeping their lances at rest, as if to put an end to all the evils which they pretended to drive away. While they were thus running, the whole population of the city and neighboring places came out to the doors of their houses, shaking, with loud exclamations and outcries, their clothes, and rubbing their bodies with their hands, in token that they wished to tear out all the evils and give them to the Incas to be destroyed. At night, after the feast, the Indians sallied out with torches bound

around with straw and fastened by coarse ropes, and ran, shaking them, through the streets until they were out of the city, extinguishing them by throwing them into the rivulets, pretending thus to destroy all nocturnal evils.

April.—In this month began the corn harvest. Agrihuay, the Peruvian name for this month, signifies an ear of corn with grains of different colors. There were premiums prepared for those who met with certain colors in the grains of full ears. He who received the premium was celebrated throughout the nation.

May, or Aymuray.—Thus called because of the conveying of the corn to the public depositories and granaries, which took place in this month.

March 2d occurred the second principal feast of the year, preceded by three days of fasting, and it was the memorable feast of the renovation of the sacred fire. On the day of the equinox the Inca waited, accompanied by all the priests and chief lords of the court, at the entrance of the chief temple, for the rising of the sun, and by means of a metallic mirror concentrated its first rays, setting fire with them to a piece of sacred cotton picked and prepared for the purpose. This substance was carried while burning to the temple, where the sacrifice and offerings to the Sun were made, and afterward it furnished fire to all the houses. When the sun was obscured they obtained fire by friction.

October. They celebrated the solemn feast of the commemoration of the dead with tears, lugubrious songs and plaintive music, and it was customary to visit the sepulchres of relations and friends, and leave in them food and drink. It is worthy of remark that this feast was celebrated among the ancient Peruvians at the same period and on the same day that the Christians solemnized the commemoration of the dead (2d of November).

In November took place the feast in commemoration of the termination of the year and the end of seed-time. A solemn day throughout the province of Cuzco was one on which the Incas and all the cavaliers of the court went out to the field and pierced the earth, after the manner of the Chinese emperors, with an instrument of gold, which corresponded to the plow. The magnates followed the example of the Inca, and this ceremony inaugurated the cultivation of the earth.

These feasts continually followed each other, so that, in a word, we may say almost half the year was passed in festivals. The offerings which the Indians presented to the Sun and other deities consisted of that which was produced both by nature and by art. The most ordinary sacrifices were of llamas, principally to the

Sun. An accurate calculation demonstrates that in the single city of Cuzco there were beheaded annually some two hundred thousand llamas in honor of the Sun. Alpacas, Vicunas and Huanacas were also victims offered to the Sun or to the Huacas. The fat of all these animals formed one of the most precious objects of the offering.

At times the offering consisted of human victims. The quantity of these victims reached a very frightful number, and consisted principally of children of tender years, which they sacrificed to the Sun, and it was no unusual thing to sacrifice two hundred at one time. At the death of an Inca or a principal chief they interred with the deceased his servants and his women. It is said that at the obsequies of Huana-Capac more than one thousand men were thus sacrificed.

Their limited knowledge of astronomy did not permit the Peruvians to make any progress in navigation. In their feeble vessels, constructed of bamboo logs, a balsa-a raft with a mast, and skins of sea-wolves or mats of rushes for sails, fitted to explore the coast of their territory and interior lakes-they did not dare to launch out into the open sea. It is worthy to notice that which is referred to by Signor Castelneau, that the mat or rush sails which they made use of in the lake of Titicaca and the mode of taking them in is identical with that which is seen upon the sepulchre of Rameses III. in Thebes.*

* When Columbus, in the year 1502, arrived at the island of Guanaja, a few leagues from the coast of Honduras, his brother, Bartholomew, with two launches full of people, landed on the island, and while on shore beheld a great canoe arrive, as from a distant and important voyage. He was struck with its magnitude and contents. It was eight feet wide and as long as a galley, though formed of the trunk of a single tree. In the centre was a kind of awning or cabin of palm leaves, after the manner of those in the gondolas of Venice, and sufficiently close to exclude both sun and rain. Under this sat a cacique, with his wives and children. Twenty-five Indians rowed the canoe, and it was filled with all kinds of articles of the manufactured and natural productions of the adjacent countries. It is supposed that this bark came from the province of Yucatan, which is about forty leagues from this island.

Among the various articles in this canoe he saw utensils and weapons much superior to those, similar, which he had already found among the natives. There were copper hatchets for cutting wood, wooden swords, with channels on each side of the blade in which sharp flints were firmly fixed by cords made of the intestines of fishes. There were copper bells and other articles of the same metal, together with a rude kind of crucible in which to melt it; various vessels and utensils neatly formed of clay, of marble and of hard wood; sheets and mantles of cotton, worked and dyed of various colors; great quantities of cacao, a fruit which the natives held in great estimation, using it both as food and

CHAPTER XI.

Peru-Guaquas-Copper Axes-Temples-Fortresses-Pucaras-Burials

-Tombs-Mummies.

THE Peruvians consecrated works to posterity; the fields are full of them, either near the burgs or villages or on the plains, on the mountains, and on the hills. They liked, as the ancient Egyptians, to be buried in remarkable places, which caused the latter to build pyramids, in the middle of which were their sepulchres, where was deposited their corpse, embalmed. In the same manner the Indians, after having carried the corpse to the place where it was to repose, without interring it, they surrounded it. with many stones and with bricks, with which they built for it a

money. There was also a beverage extracted from Indian corn, resembling beer. Their provisions consisted of corn-bread and roots of various kinds. The women wore mantles, with which they wrapped themselves, like the female Moors of Granada, and the men had cloths of cotton round their loins. Both sexes appeared more particular about these coverings and to have a quicker sense of modesty than any Indians Columbus had yet discovered. These circumstances, together with the superiority of their implements and manufactures, were held by the Admiral as indications that he was approaching more civilized nations. They informed him that they had just arrived from a country rich, cultivated and industrious, situated to the west.—IRVING.

Bartram gives the following account of the canoes and navigation of the Florida Indians in 1774:

"The town of Talahasochte is on the banks of the Little San Juan. The river at the town is about a hundred yards over, and fifteen or twenty feet deep. The town is delightfully situated on the elevated east bank of the river, the ground level to near the river, when it descends suddenly to the water. I suppose the perpendicular elevation of the ground may be between twenty and thirty feet.

"These Indians have large, handsome canoes, which they form out of the trunks of cypress trees, some of them commodious enough to accommodate twenty or thirty warriors. In these large canoes they descend the river, on trading and hunting expeditions, to the sea-coast, neighboring islands and keys, quite to the point of Florida, and sometimes across the gulf, extending their navigation to the Bahama islands and even to Cuba. A crew of these adventurers had just returned from Cuba, but a few days before our arrival, with a cargo of spirituous liquors, coffee, sugar and tobacco. One of them politely presented me with a choice piece of tobacco, which he told me he had received from the governor of Cuba.

"They deal in the way of barter, carrying with them deer-skins, furs, dry fish, beeswax, honey, bear's oil and some other things."-BARTRAM, 222–225.