1863 Squier was appointed as U. S. commissioner to Peru, where he made an exhaustive investigation of Inca remains and took numerous photographs of them. He later gave a series of 12 lectures on "The Inca Empire" for the Lowell Institute for their 1866–67 season. In 1868 he was appointed consul-general of Honduras at New York, and in 1871 he was elected as the first president of the Anthropological Institute of New York. He conducted ethnological studies, especially in Nicaragua, Honduras and Peru. On returning from Peru, he continued working for Frank Leslie, but gave it up when his health failed. In 1873, his wife divorced him, and married Leslie a year later. In 1874 Squier's health became so seriously impaired as to preclude further original research. Though he subsequently recovered sufficiently to direct the final preparation and revision of his work on Peru for publication, the affliction resulted in his death. He was a member of numerous historical, archaeological, and scientific societies. He died in Brooklyn, New York. Works Besides many official reports, scientific papers, magazine articles, and contributions to the Encyclopædia Britannica and foreign periodicals, his works include: Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley ("Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge", vol. 1, 1848) Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York ("Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge", vol. 2, 1849; Buffalo, 1851) Serpent Symbols (1852) Nicaragua: its People, Scenery, Monuments, and the Proposed Interoceanic Canal (2 vols., New York, 1852) Notes on Central America (1854) Waikna, or Adventures on the Mosquito Shore (1855) The States of Central America (1857; revised ed., 1870) Monographs of Authors who have written on the Aboriginal Languages of Central America (1860) Tropical Fibres and their Economic Extraction (1861) Peru: Incidents and Explorations in the Land of the Incas (1877) Notes References External links 1821 births 1888 deaths American archaeologists Incan scholars American Mesoamericanists Mesoamerican archaeologists 19th-century American newspaper editors 19th-century Mesoamericanists People from Bethlehem, New York American male journalists 19th-century American male writers