Most strikingly Peruvian is the monk’s account of ’the Kingdom and the Nobles.’  The name Ichi, is strikingly suggestive of the natural Chinese pronunciation of the word Inca.  The stress laid on the three grades of nobles, suggests the Peruvian Inca castes of lower grade, as well as the Mexican; while the stately going forth of the king, ’accompanied by horns and trumpets,’ vividly recalls Prescott’s account of the journeyings of the Peruvian potentate.  The change of the color of his garments according to the astronomical cycle, is, however, more thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of the institutions of the Children of the Sun than any thing which we have met in the whole of this strange and obsolete record.  ‘The ritual of the Incas,’ says Prescott, ’involved a routine of observances as complex and elaborate as ever distinguished that of any nation, whether pagan or Christian.  Each month had its appropriate festival, or rather festivals.  The four principal had reference to the Sun, and commemorated the great periods of his annual progress, the solstices and equinoxes.  Garments of a peculiar wool, and feathers of a peculiar color, were reserved to the Incas.  I can not identify the blue, red, yellow, and black, but it is worthy of remark that the rainbow was his special attribute or scutcheon, and that the mere fact that his whole life was passed in accordance with the requisitions of astronomical festivals, and that different colors were reserved to him and identified with him, establishes a strange analogy with the narrative of Hoei-schin.

’Of this subject of the cycles and change of colors corresponding to astronomical mutations, it is worth noting that Montesinos[J] expressly asserts that the Peruvians threw their years into cycles of ten; a curious fact which has escaped the notice of Neumann, who conjectures that ’it may have been a subdivision of the Aztec period, or have even been used as an independent period, as was indeed the case by the Chinese, who term their notations ‘stems.’  It is worthy of remark,’ he adds, ’that among the Mongols and Mantchous these ‘stems’ are named after colors which perhaps have some relation to the several colors of the royal clothing in the cycles of ‘Fusang.’  These Tartaric tribes term the first two years of the ten-year cyclus, ‘green and greenish,’ the two next, ‘red and reddish,’ and soon, yellow and yellowish, white and whitish, and finally, black and blackish.’

I am perfectly aware that Peru is not Mexico; but I beg the reader to keep in mind my former observation, that Mexico might have been at one time peopled by a race who had Peruvian customs, which in after-years were borne by them far to the South.  The ancient mythology and ethnography of Mexico presents, however, a mass of curious identities with that of Asia.  Both Mexico and Peru had the tradition of a deluge, from which seven prisoners escaped; in the hieroglyphs of the former country, these seven are represented as issuing from an egg.