are frequently offered for sale in the Andes by the dealers in primitive medicines who may be found in almost every market-place.  Probably Senor Posnansky’s seahorse was brought from the ocean by some particularly enterprising trader.  Although starfish are common enough in the Andes and a seahorse has actually found its resting-place in La Paz, this does not alter the fact that scientific investigators have never found any strictly marine fauna in Lake Titicaca.  On the other hand, it has two or three kinds of edible fresh-water fish.  One of them belongs to a species found in the Rimac River near Lima.  It seems to me entirely possible that the Incas, with their scorn of the difficulties of carrying heavy burdens over seemingly impossible trails, might have deliberately transplanted the desirable fresh-water fishes of the Rimac River to Lake Titicaca.

Polo de Ondegardo, who lived in Cuzco in 1560, says that the Incas used to bring fresh fish from the sea by special runners, and that “they have records in their quipus of the fish having been brought from Tumbez, a distance of more than three hundred leagues.”  The actual transference of water jars containing the fish would have offered no serious obstacle whatever to the Incas, provided the idea happened to appeal to them as desirable.  Yet I may be as far wrong as Senor Posnansky!  At any rate, the romantic stories of a gigantic inland sea, vastly more extensive than the present lake and actually surrounding the ancient city of Tiahuanaco, must be treated with respectful skepticism.

Tiahuanaco, at the southern end of Lake Titicaca, in Bolivia, is famous for the remains of a pre-Inca civilization.  Unique among prehistoric remains in the highlands of Peru or Bolivia are its carved monolithic images.  Although they have suffered from weathering and from vandalism, enough remains to show that they represent clothed human figures.  The richly decorated girdles and long tunics are carved in low relief with an intricate pattern.  While some of the designs are undoubtedly symbolic of the rank, achievements, or attributes of the divinities or chiefs here portrayed, there is nothing hieroglyphic.  The images are stiff and show no appreciation of the beauty of the human form.  Probably the ancient artists never had an opportunity to study the human body.  In Andean villages, even little children do not go naked as they do among primitive peoples who live in warm climates.  The Highlanders of Peru and Bolivia are always heavily clothed, day and night.  Forced by their climate to seek comfort in the amount and thickness of their apparel, they have developed an excessive modesty in regard to bodily exposure which is in striking contrast to people who live on the warm sands of the South Seas.  Inca sculptors and potters rarely employed the human body as a motif.  Tiahuanaco is pre-Inca, yet even here the images are clothed.  They were not represented as clothed in order to make easier the work of the sculptor.  His carving shows he had great skill, was observant, and had true artistic feeling.  Apparently the taboo against “nakedness” was too much for him.