Page 151 - La Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique - Rapport 1961
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ANNUAL ADDRESS. 147
valley of Cuzco from the south. Although both were called
white men, yet the descriptions of the Inca complexion do not
indicate a European origin, while every feature of their charac-
ter and civilization was decidedly Asiatic. Their civilization
differed materially from the Aztec, and hence Mr. Prescott con-
cludes that it could not have been derived from Mexico, and that
the two nations never had any knowledge of, or connection with
each other. Still it is quite certain that the Muyscas, inhabit-
'ing the same great plateau, were from Mexico, and that the Peru-
vians and Mexicans had many things in common; and it does
not follow, necessarily nor naturally, that the civilization of
Mexico, at the time of the conquest, was what it always had
been. One civilized people after another came to the country
and crossed their blood and civilization with their predecessors,
and the Incas, or men of Lake Titicaca, may have left Mexico
at a time when its civilization was quite different from that
found by the Spaniards. If the original Inca stock were cast-
aways upon the north-west coast, it seems scarcely possible that
they could have penetrated into South America without having
first been iricorporated into the empire of Mexico, which evi-
dently had its origin anterior to that of Peru.
We have already remarked that chance voyages by way of
the South Pacific, might be regarded as possible. But if pos-
sible at all, it would only be from nations accustomed to the use
of large vessels, and, of course, advanced in civilization. A
large vessel which chanced to be well stored, might be driven
over that wide waste of waters and land its inmates on the
coast of South America, any where between twenty-five or
thirty degrees South, and Cape Horn. Any one who has seen
a Chinese junk and considers that it is just about the same sort
of a craft that it was two tl~ousand years ago, will not doubt its
capacity to sustain a chance voyage, even of this procligious
length, and he will, moreover, wonder that such a clumsy thing
could ever make anything but a chance voyage. The strongly
marked Chinese character of the Incas, ai~d the mixture of
