in some of the ruined works around Lake Titicaca, point to the memorials of centuries to which the Peruvians themselves looked back as an ancient and half-forgotten past in the days of the Incas. On the shores of Lake Titicaca, extensive ruins still remain, which are believed to have been in the same condition at the date of the Conquest, and to have furnished the models of that architecture with which the Incas covered their wide. domains. Valueless as much of the Mexican chronology is, their mode of recording events gave some definite hold on the chronicles of the nation; whereas the system of Peruvian quipus, under their quipucamayus, or keeper, could have transmitted accurate records, at the most, only to a few generations, and render valueless the pretended history of the dynasty of Manco Capac. In the megalithic character of their architecture, however, the elements of a self-originated and primitive art are strikingly apparent. It is one of the most characteristic features pertaining to the development of human thought in the earliest stages of constructive skill. There seems to be an epoch in the early history of man, when what may be styled the megalithic era of art develops itself under the utmost variety of circumstances. In Egypt, it was carried out with peculiar refinement by a people whose mastery of sculpture and the decorative arts, proves that it had its origin in a far deeper source than the mere barbarous love of vast and imposing masses. In Assyria, India, Persia, and throughout the Asiatic continent, this taste appears to have manifested itself among many and widely severed races; and in northern Europe and the British Isles its enduring memorials are seen in such rudely massive structures as Stennis and Stonehenge. The same mental condition finds expression in the pyramidal terraces and vast temple façades of Central America and Yucatan, and is more fully present in the

massive solidity of Peruvian masonry. It is the uncon scious aim at the expression of abstract power, which attests its triumphs in such barbaric evidence of difficulties overcome; and although it fails even to strive after the beautiful, it not unfrequently impresses us with a sense of sublimity in the very embodiment of that power by which it was achieved.

In this respect the most ancient architectural remains of the southern continent have a higher ethnological value than those of Mexico, Central America, or Yucatan; for they reveal to us the only truly primitive and apparently self-originating architecture of the New World and, therefore, suggest a possible centre from whence that intellectual impulse went forth, pervading with its elevating and refining influences the nations who were first discovered, by the European adventurers of the sixteenth century, on the mainland of America ; although at that date the distinct centres of Mexican and Peruvian arts were in operation wholly independent of each other, and had moved in opposite directions, unconscious of the rivalry thus carried on in the development of a native civilisation for the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CERAMIC ART: POTTERY.

AMONG the primitive arts, in which the first rude requirements of primeval man were supplemented by evidences of taste and skill, the plastic or ceramic art merits, on many accounts, a foremost place. The plasticity of the potter's clay, which furnishes so many beautiful and striking metaphors of the Hebrew Scriptures, supplied a means whereby the varying phases of rudimentary national art, and the peculiar habits and tastes of diverse races, could perpetuate the minutest traits of intellectual development. The delicate shades of variation which give individuality and local character to tribes and national subdivisions, are scarcely more minute or expressive than those which the plastic clay has received from the potter's hand, to perpetuate local habits and tastes. On the plains of Shinar, the fathers of the undeluged world wrought and burnt the clay where still some of the most remarkable chronicles of early Asiatic civilisation are recovered, including their cuneatic bricks and cylinders, eloquent with a definite written history. Egypt, too, had her sun-dried bricks and pottery of diverse forms; in working which the Egyptian taskmasters made the lives of their Hebrew serfs bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick. These sun-dried bricks, which in the humid climates of temperate zones would perish in a few seasons, survive amid the sculptured granite and limestones of ancient Egypt, with the

still decipherable stamps of their makers, or with the historical cartouche of a Rameses or Thothmes unmistakably chronicling their antiquity. The Arabian conquerors who impressed new phases of art on the historical products of the Nile valley, carried with them into Spain the Egyptian fashion of building with sun-dried clay; and the Spanish term adobe, by which the Spanish American now designates the clay-built structures of Mexico and other parts of the New World, is the Arabic cob introduced into Spain by its African conquerors in the eighth century. But the simple art of building with sun-baked bricks was practised both in Mexico and Peru long before the Spaniard followed there the borrowed arts of the Saracen ; and in no region of the world has the ingenuity of the potter been more curiously tasked than on the sites of the ancient Peruvian civilisation.

Few traces of antique art have proved more serviceable to the historian and ethnologist than those of the potter's handiwork. The graceful contour of the rudest Hellenic vase reflects the national genius that evoked the sculptures of the Parthenon; and reveals also, at times, the sensuous refinement that wrought its overthrow. The coarser, but more practical intellect of Rome gives character to her fictile ware; and the pottery, both of ancient and modern nations, reflects, as in a mirror, their salient mental characteristics. For it is an art, which, while it admits of all the perfection of form that a Phidias could impart, and all the exquisite beauty of adornment which a Raphael could design, is nevertheless allied to the homely duties and necessities of daily life. It does not therefore reflect the mere exceptional refinements of luxury, but also retains the impress of that prevailing standard of taste which suffices to satisfy the common mind. Hence the value of pottery as a material of history. Even its scattered fragments chronicle decipherable records; while

from the more perfectly treasured sepulchral pottery, we recover minute traces of the manners and customs of long extinct nations, and trace the geographical limits of their conquests or their commerce, within well-defined periods of their history. Numismatic evidence is scarcely more definite, and much less comprehensive. The progress of Egypt and the many changes it has undergone through the long ages of its history, find striking illustrations in the pottery and porcelain accumulated on its historic sites. Grecian colonization, and its æsthetic influence, are traced along the shores of the Mediterranean and the Euxine, by its beautiful fictile ware and its sepulchral pottery. Etruria's history is written to a great extent in the same fragile, yet enduring characters. The footprints of the Roman conqueror are clearly defined to the utmost limits of imperial dominion by the same evidence; and sepulchral pottery is frequently the only conclusive evidence which enables the European ethnologist to discriminate between the grave of the intruding conqueror, and that of the aboriginal occupant of the soil. Apart, therefore, from the exquisite beauty of many ancient remains of fictile art, which confers on them a high intrinsic value, the works of the potter have been minutely studied by the archæologist, and are constantly referred to as historical evidence, in proof of the geographical limits of the ancient empires of the Old World. But nowhere has incipient civilisation given more distinctive characteristics to fictile art than in the New World. Tried by this psychical test of æsthetic development, the unity of the American as a distinct race disappears as unequivocally as when fairly subjected to the physical proofs of cranial formation, from which such supposed homogeneous characteristics have been chiefly deduced. The northern region lying around and immediately to the south of the great lakes, has its pecu