134 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
victory. When they died, a loving people, with wailings and 
lamentations, celebrated their obsequies. The funeral pyre 
was built, the body burnt, and the ashes carefully gathered 
together, and placed in the finely-wrought urn and painted 
cinerary, and this in one larger and coarser. These were 
buried with the stone maize-grinder, and sometimes weapons 
and earthen dishes and food. Over the grave a pile of stones 
was raised, and skilful artificers were set to work on the 
hardest and toughest stone they could find to make a statue 
of the chief whose memory they reverenced. It must have 
taken months, if not years, to have fashioned the statue I 
have figured out of the trachyte without tools of iron, and 
it strikes one with wonder to think of the patience and per- 
severance with which the details were worked out. No eye- 
servers were these Indians; before and behind they bestowed 
equal pains and labour on their work, undeterred by the 
hardness of the materials or the rudeness of their tools. 
When we turn from these works and remains of a great 
and united tribe to the miserable huts of the present natives, 
we feel how great a curse the Spanish invasion has in some 
respects been to Central America. The half-breed, wrapped 
up in himself, lives from year to year in his thatched hut, 
looking after a few cows, and making cheese from their milk. 
He perhaps plants a small patch of maize once a year, and 
grows a few plantains, content to live on the plainest fare, 
and in the rudest style, so that he may indulge in indolence 
and sloth. So he vegetates and drops into his grave, and in 
a year or two no mark or sign tells where he was laid. The 
graves of the old Indians are still to be found, but no mounds 
mark the spots where the inhabitants of the valley since the 
conquest have been laid to rest. They have passed away, 
as they lived, without a record or memorial. 
The builders of these cairns and the fashioners of these 
statues were a different and a better race. They stood by 
each other, and reverenced and obeyed their chiefs. They 
tilled the ground and lived on the fruits of it. From the 
accounts of all the historians of the Spanish conquest, the 
Pacific side of Nicaragua was so densely populated when 
the Spaniards first arrived that the greater part of it must 
have been cultivated like a garden; and it is probable that 
the population was ten times greater than itisnow. Another 
