eir servants. Citlalicue
rather jeered at her unconsidered offspring. She advised them to go to
the lord of the homes of the departed, Mictlanteuctli, and borrow a
bone or some ashes of the dead who are with him. We must never ask for
consistency from myths. This statement implies that men had already
been in existence, though they were not yet created. Perhaps they had
perished in one of the four great destructions. With difficulty and
danger the gods stole a bone from Hades, placed it in a bowl, and
smeared it with their own blood, as in Chaldea and elsewhere. Finally, a
boy and a girl were born out of the bowl. From this pair sprang men, and
certain of the gods, jumping into a furnace, became sun and moon. To the
sun they then, in Aztec fashion, sacrificed themselves, and there,
one might think, was an end of them. But they afterwards appeared in
wondrous fashions to their worshippers, and ordained the ritual of
religion. According to another legend, man and woman (as in African
myths) struggled out of a hole in the ground.(1)

(1) Authorities: Ixtlil.; Kingsborough, ix. pp. 205, 206; Sahagun, Hist.
Gen., i. 3, vii. 2; J. G. Muller, p. 510, where Muller compares the
Delphic conception of ages of the world; Bancroft, iii. pp. 60, 65.

The myths of the peoples under the empire of the Incas in Peru are
extremely interesting, because almost all mythical formations are found
existing together, while we have historical evidence as to the order and
manner of their development. The Peru of the Incas covered the modern
state of the same name, and included Ecuador, with parts of Chili and
Bolivia. M. Reville calculates that the empire was about 2500 miles in
length, four times as long as France, and that its breadth was from 250
to 500 miles. The country, contained three different climatic regions,
and was peopled by races of many different degrees of culture, all more
or less subject to the dominion of the Children of the Sun. The three
regions were the dry strip along the coast, the fertile and cultivated
land about the spurs of the Cordilleras, and the inland mountain
regions, inhabited by the wildest races. Near Cuzco, the Inca capital,
was the Lake of Titicaca, the Mediterranean, as it were, of Peru, for
on the shores of this inland sea was developed the chief civilisation of
the new world.

As to the institutions, myths and religion of the empire, we have
copious if contradictory information. There are the narrativ