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Show 450 PERU. July, 1835. few willows ; and the presence of an occasional clump of bananas and of oranges, alone reminded one that the landscape of a country in latitude 12° might have boasted of a far more splendid vegetation. The city of Lima is now in a wretched state of decay : the streets are nearly unpaved, and heaps of filth are piled up in all directions ; where the black gallinazos, tame as poultry, pick up bits of carrion. The houses have generally an upper story, built, on account of the earthquakes, of plastered woodwork ; but some of the old ones, which are now used by several families, are immensely large, and would rival in suites of apartments the most magnificent in any place. Lima, the City of the Kings, must formerly have been a splendid town. The extraordinary number of churches, even at the present day, gives it a peculiar and striking character, especially when viewed from a short dis-tance. One day I went out with some merchants to hunt in the immediate vicinity of the city. Our sport was very poor ; but I had an opportunity of seeing the ruins of one of the ancient Indian villages, with its hill-like mound in the centre. The remains of houses, enclosures, irrigating streams, and burial mounds, scattered over this plain, cannot fail to give one a high idea of the condition and number of the ancient population. When their earthenware, woollen clothes, utensils of elegant forms cut out of the hardest rocks, tools of copper, ornaments of precious stones, palaces and hydraulic works, are considered, it is impossibl~ not to respect the considerable advance made by them in the arts of civilization. The burial mounds, called H uacas, are really stupendous ; although in some places it is only a natural hill which appears to have been incased and modelled. There is also another and very different clas,s of ruins, which possesses some interest, namely, those of old Callao, overwhelmed by the great earthquake of 17 46, and its accompanying wave. The destruction must have been more complete even than at Concepcion. Quantities of shingle almost conceal the foundations of the walls, and vast masses of July, 1835. RUINS OF CALLAO. 451 brickw~rk appear to have been whirled about by the retiring waves hke pebbles. It has been stated that the land bsided during this memorable shock ·' I could not d'l SCsOuV er any proof of this; yet it seems far from improbable, for the form of the coast must certainly have undergone s h . orne c ange smce the foundation of the old town · as no pe 1 · h · ' ope m t e1r senses wou~d willi~gly have chosen for their building place the narrow sp1t of shmgle on which the ruins now stand. On the island ?f Sa~ ~orenzo, there are very satisfactory proofs of elevation Withm the recent period : this of course would not contravene the belief of a small subsidence if an s1. gns of sue h movement could be discovered. The ' side oyf the mountain fronting the bay on that island, is worn into three obscure terraces, which are covered by masses of ~hells many hundred tons in weight, of species now existmg on the be~ch. Several of the univalves had serpulro and small balan~ attached o~ their insides; proving that they must have remamed some time, after the animal had died, at the bottom of the sea. In such cases we may feel sure that they had not been carried up, as has sometimes been believed, either by birds or men for food. .W hen examining the beds of shells ' which have been raised above the level of the sea, on other parts of the coast, I often felt curious to trace their final disappearance from decay. On the island of San Lorenzo, this could be done in the most satisfactory manner : at a small height the shells were quite perfect; on a terrace, eighty-five feet above the sea, they were partially decomposed and coated by a soft scaly substance ; at double this altitude a thin layer of calcareous powder beneath the soil, without a trace of organic structure, was all that could be discovered. This hiO'hly curious and . 0 satisfactory gradation of change, it is evident c<mld be traced only under the peculiar conditions of this climate, where rain never falls so as to wash away the particles of shells in their ~ast stage of decomposition. I was much interested by findmg embedded, together with pieces of sea-weed in the mass of shells, in the eighty-five foot bed, a bit of cotton-tln·efld, 2 G 2 |