public and private, and much else relating thereto, and showing the real instead of the fanciful ideas, as imagined by recent writers, of what these old peoples believed and really held with regard to their "sun-worship." We find that their "sun-myths" in reality regarded the sun as the home of their ancestors' spirits, and in their mode of addressing the sun it was actually only an abbreviated form of addressing these spirits of the ancestors in their home in the sun, which was their heaven or celestial region, the paradise of their forefathers' souls. Upon examining the histories found to be engraved on these inscriptions, much light is thrown upon the migrations, the intermarryings, the fightings, the conquests and drivings out, or the enslavings and the regaining of their freedom again; also their clan and tribal origins and race relationships. While some of these narratives may have been from oral traditions, others must have been from older documents or writings, as in some of these inscriptions several lines of quotations of precisely the same compound hieroglyphics are copied without any variation of any kind, although in part of the line before, and the one after, it is altogether different.
   In some instances these inscriptions confirm the writings of the early Spanish authors, but in other instances they do not; but they give a clearer and evidently a better account of the circumstances they relate.
   As these inscriptions were not written with the same object in view as historians now write, but were composed to briefly narrate to their own people what had happened to their forefathers, or their neighbours in the past, with the object of defining clan, tribal, or the chieftains's relationships: they do not go into long explanations or details, as they might have done if they had intended them for the perusal of foreigners. This makes them more reliable, so that we may pick out the information or the truths they contain about the old tribes, clans, or races from which these people had sprung, and thus we can learn much, that without these inscriptions would have been lost for ever, concerning the races or the nations in Ecuador, Columbia or in Quito, and in the Colla or Aymara countries, or around the lake regions of Titicaca, in which such great stone ruins as those near Tia-huanuco are still to be found. The Inca monarchs of Peru tried to destroy all histories except their own, and also tried to enforce their own rule, and the belief in their own miraculous origin, so that little of the history of the earlier or the neighbouring natives has been transmitted to the present times, although several of these nations wrote in hieroglyphics as well as in phonetic characters, but little of these, except these Easter Island inscriptions, have been preserved about the people who dwelt in the countries between the Andes or the other mountains and the coast of the Pacific, and still less is known of where any of these people came from, or which they themselves