Excursions 8 3 
are so badly paid by the government that they have to 
depend upon the fees of suitors for their support, and are 
much open to corruption. These rides and strolls into the 
woods were very fruitful in natural-history acquisitions and 
observations. I shall give an account of some of those made 
in the immediate vicinity of Santo Domingo, and I wish I 
could transfer to my readers some of the pleasure that they 
afforded me. They gave the relief that enabled me to carry 
on for years an incessant struggle, under great difficulties, 
to bring the mines into a paying state, continually hampered 
for want of sufficient capital, with most inadequate machinery, 
and all the annoyances, delays, and disappointments inevit- 
able in carrying on such a precarious enterprise as gold- 
mining far in the interior of a half-civilised country. 
The brook that ran at the foot of the bank below my 
house, and there called the “ Quebrada de Santo Domingo,” 
is dignified half a mile lower down, after passing the mines of 
the Javali Company and receiving the waters of another 
brook coming down from the westward, by the name of the 
Javali river. The Indians, however, both at the Indian 
village of Carca, seven miles back in the mountains, and those 
lower down the river itself, call it “ Artigua.” The preserva- 
tion of these old Indian names is important, as they might 
some time or other throw considerable light on the early 
inhabitants of the country. In all parts of the world the 
names of mountains, valleys, lakes, and rivers are among the 
most certain memorials of the ancient inhabitants. The 
reason the names of the natural features of a country remain 
unchanged under the sway of successive nations, speaking 
totally different languages, appears to be this. The success- 
ful invaders of a country, even in the most cruel times, never 
exterminated ‘the people they conquered; at the least, the 
young women were spared. The conquerors established 
their own language, and to everything they had known in 
their own land they gave their own names; but to things 
quite new to them, which nearly always included the moun- 
tains, valleys, lakes, and rivers, and often the towns and 
many of the natural productions, they accepted the existing 
names from the survivors of the conquered people. Often 
the names were corrupted, the new inhabitants altering 
them just a little, to render their pronunciation easier, or to 
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