In the minuter mechanical arts, both showed considerable skill;
but in the construction of important public works, of roads,
aqueducts, canals, and in agriculture in all its details, the
Peruvians were much superior. Strange that they should have
fallen so far below their rivals in their efforts after a higher
intellectual culture, in astronomical science, more especially,
and in the art of communicating thought by visible symbols. When
we consider the greater refinement of the Incas, their
inferiority to the Aztecs in these particulars can be explained
only by the fact, that the latter in all probability were
indebted for their science to the race who preceded them in the
land, - that shadowy race whose origin and whose end are alike
veiled from the eye of the inquirer, but who possibly may have
sought a refuge from their ferocious invaders in those regions of
Central America the architectural remains of which now supply us
with the most pleasing monuments of Indian civilization. It is
with this more polished race, to whom the Peruvians seem to have
borne some resemblance in their mental and moral organization,
that they should be compared. Had the empire of the Incas been
permitted to extend itself with the rapid strides with which it
was advancing at the period of the Spanish conquest, the two
races might have come into conflict, or, perhaps, into alliance
with one another.
The Mexicans and Peruvians, so different in the character of
their peculiar civilization, were, it seems probable, ignorant of
each other's existence; and it may appear singular, that, during
the simultaneous continuance of their empires, some of the seeds
of science and of art, which pass so imperceptibly from one
people to another, should not have found their way across the
interval which separated the two nations.
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