Cnap. X. INDIAN LANGUAGES. 277 
of the country. We had the corpse clothed in a robe of fine calico, 
crossed her hands on her breast over a “ palma” of flowers, and made 
also a crown of flowers for her head. Scores of helpless children like 
our poor Oria die at Ega, or on the road ; but generally not the slightest 
care is taken of them during their illness. They are the captives made 
during the merciless raids of one section of the Mirdnha tribe on the 
territories of another, and sold to the Ega traders. The villages of the 
attacked hordes are surprised, and the men and women killed or driven 
into the thickets without having time to save their children. There 
appears to be no doubt that the Mirdnhas are cannibals, and therefore 
the purchase of these captives probably saves them from a worse fate. 
The demand for them at Ega operates, however, as a direct cause of 
the supply, stimulating the unscrupulous chiefs, who receive all the 
profits, to undertake these murderous expeditions. 
_ It is remarkable how quickly the savages of the various nations, which 
each have their own, to all appearance, widely different language, learn 
Tupi on their arrival at Ega, where it is the common idiom. This 
perhaps may be attributed chiefly to the grammatical forms of all the 
Indian tongues being the same, although the words are different. As 
far as I could learn, the feature is common to all, of placing the preposi- 
tion after the noun, making it, in fact, a fos+position, thus : “he is come 
the village from” ; “go him wth, the plantation 7,” and so forth. The 
ideas to be expressed in their limited sphere of life and thought are 
few ; consequently the stock of words is extremely small; besides, all 
Indians have the same way of thinking, and the same objects to talk 
about ; these circumstances also contribute to the ease with which they 
learn each other’s language. Hordes of the same tribe living on the 
same branch rivers, speak mutually unintelligible languages ; this happens 
with the Miranhas on the Japurti, and with the Collinas on the Jurta; 
whilst Tupi is spoken with little corruption along the banks of the main 
Amazons for a distance of 2500 miles. The purity of Tupi is kept up by 
frequent communication amongst the natives, from one end to the other 
of the main river; how complete and long-continued must be the 
isolation in which the small groups of savages have lived in other parts, 
to have caused so complete a segregation of dialects! It is probable 
that the strange inflexibility of the Indian organisation, both bodily and 
mental, is owing to the isolation in which each small tribe has lived, 
and to the narrow round of life and thought, and close intermarriages 
for countless generations, which are the necessary results. Their 
fecundity is of a low degree, for it is very rare to find an Indian family 
having so many as four children; and we have seen how great is their 
liability to sickness and death on removal from place to place. 
I have already remarked on the different way in which the climate of 
this equatorial region affects Indians and negroes. No one could live 
long amongst the Indians of the Upper Amazons, without being struck 
with their constitutional dislike to the heat. Europeans certainly with- 
stand the high temperature better than the original inhabitants of the 
country ; I always found I could myself bear exposure to the sun or 
unusually hot weather quite as well as the Indians, although not well 
fitted by nature for a hot climate. Their skin is always hot to the touch, 
