Of the Charruas every man was a warrior; self-relying, strong, and cruel; with his hand against the Spaniard, and with his hand against the other aborigines. Many of these they exterminated, and, too proud to enter into confederations, always fought single-handed. In 1831, the President of Uraguay ordered their total destruction, and they were cut down, root and branch; a few survivors only remaining.

Minus the Fuegians, this division is pre-eminently natural; yet the Fuegians cannot be disconnected from it. As a proof of the physical differences being small, I will add the description of a naturalist—D’Orbigny—who separates them. They evidently lie within a small compass.

D’Orbigny is a writer by no means inclined to undervalue differences. Nevertheless he places the Peruvians and the Araucanians in the same primary division. This shows that, if other characters connect them, there is nothing very conclusive in the way of physiognomy against their relationship. I think that certain other characters do connect them—language most especially. At the same time, there is no denying important contrasts. The civilization of Peru has no analogue beyond the Tropics; and if we are to consider this as a phænomenon per se, as the result of an instinct as different from those of the Charrua as the [architectural] impulses of the bee and the hornet, broad and trenchant must be our lines of demarcation. Yet no such lines can be drawn. Undoubted members of the Quichua stock of the Inca Peruvians (architects and conquerors, as that particular branch was) are but ordinary Indians—like the Aymaras. Nay, the modern Peruvians when contrasted with their ancestors are in the same category. The present occupants of the parts about Titicaca and Tiaguanaco wonder at the ruins around them, and confess their inability to rival them just as a modern Greek thinks of the Phidian Jupiter and despairs. Again, the gap is accounted for—since most of those intervening populations which may have exhibited transitional characters have become either extinct, or denationalized. Between the Peruvians and Araucanians, the Atacamas and Changos are the only remaining populations—under 10,000 in number, and but little known.

Nevertheless, an unequivocally allied population of the Peruvian stock takes us from 28° S. lat. to the Equator. Its unity within itself is undoubted; and its contrast with the next nearest families is no greater than the displacements which have taken place around, and our own ignorance in respect to parts in contact with it.

Of all the populations of the world, the Peruvian is the most vertical in its direction. Its line is due north and south; its breadth but narrow. The Pacific is at one side, and the Andes at the other. One is well-nigh as definite a limit as the other. When we cross the Cordilleras the Peruvian type has changed.

The Peruvians lie between the Tropics. They cross the Equator. One of their Republics—Ecuador—even takes its name from its meridian. But they are also mountaineers; and, though their sun is that of Africa, their soil is that of the Himalaya. Hence, their locality presents a conflict, balance, or antagonism of climatologic influences; and the degrees of altitude are opposed to those of latitude.

Again, their line of migration is at a right angle with their Equatorial parallel—that is, if we assume them to have come from North America. The bearing of this is as follows:—The town of Quito is about as far from Mexico due north, as it is from French Guiana due west. Now if we suppose the line of migration to have reached Peru from the latter country, the great-great-ancestors of the Peruvians would be people as inter-tropical as themselves, and the influences of climate would coincide with the influences of descent; whereas if it were North America from which they originated, their ancestors of a corresponding generation would represent the effect of a climate twenty-five degrees further north—these, in their turn, being descended from the occupants of the temperate, and they from those of the frigid zone. The full import of the relation of the lines of migration—real or hypothetical—to the degrees of latitude has yet to be duly appreciated. To say that the latter go for nothing because the inter-tropical Indian of South America is not as black as the negro, is to compare things that resemble each other in one particular only.

It is Peru where the ancient sepulchral remains have complicated ethnology. The skulls from ancient burial-places are preternaturally flattened. Consider this natural; and you have a fair reason for the recognition of a fresh species of the genus Homo. But is it legitimate to do so? I think not. That the practice of flattening the head of infants was a custom once as rife and common in Peru as it is in many other parts of both North and South America at the present day, is well known. Then why not account for the ancient flattening thus? I hold that the writers who hesitate to do this should undertake the difficult task of proving a negative: otherwise they multiply causes unnecessarily.

Two stocks of vast magnitude take up so large a proportion of South America, that though they are not in immediate geographical contact with the Peruvians, they require to be mentioned next in order here. They are mentioned now in order to enable us to treat of other and smaller families. These two great stocks are the Guarani and the Carib; whilst the classes immediately under notice are—