]
The employment of domestic animals distinguished the Peruvians
from the other races of the New World. This economy of human
labor by the substitution of the brute is an important element of
civilization, inferior only to what is gained by the substitution
of machinery for both. Yet the ancient Peruvians seem to have
made much less account of it than their Spanish conquerors, and
to have valued the llama, in common with the other animals of
that genus, chiefly for its fleece. Immense herds of these
"large cattle," as they were called, and of the "smaller cattle,"
*3 or alpacas, were held by the government, as already noticed,
and placed under the direction of shepherds, who conducted them
from one quarter of the country to another, according to the
changes of the season. These migrations were regulated with all
the precision with which the code of the mesta determined the
migrations of the vast merino flocks in Spain; and the
Conquerors, when they landed in Peru, were amazed at finding a
race of animals so similar to their own in properties and habits,
and under the control of a system of legislation which might seem
to have been imported from their native land. *4
[Footnote 3: Ganado maior, ganado menor.]
[Footnote 4: The judicious Ondegardo emphatically recommends the
adoption of many of these regulations by the Spanish government,
as peculiarly suited to the exigencies of the natives. "En esto
de los ganados parescio haber hecho muchas constituciones en
diferentes tiempos e algunas tan utiles e provechosas para su
conservacion que conven dria que tambien guardasen agora.
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