THE GUIANAS AND VENEZUELA 



they are a short-lived people, becoming aged at forty, and but rarely surviving till sixty. 

 Cleanliness is a pleasing feature of the majority; this being due to the frequent baths, which 

 are always taken just after a meal. In swimming the legs are scarcely bent out, but are 

 drawn straight under the body, and then shot backwards. 



Flattening the head of infants, which formerly prevailed among the Caribs, is still 

 practised by a little-known tribe on the Essequibo. "Among the true Caribs," writes Mr. im 

 Thurn, "a two-inch-broad belt of cotton is knitted round each ankle and just below each 

 knee of very young female children; and this band is never throughout life removed, or if 

 removed is immediately replaced. The consequence is that the muscles of the calf swell out 

 to an abnormal degree between these bands, while those parts of the leg which are actually 

 constricted remain hardly thicker than the bone. . . . The arms are more rarely constricted in 

 the same way. Of the other Carib tribes, the Macusi and Arecuna women have one such con- 

 striction above each ankle, but not the second below the knee. . . . The true Carib and Ackawoi 

 women* and more rarely those of other tribes, pierce one or more holes in their lower lips, 

 through each of which they pass, point outward, a pin or sharpened piece of wood. "What 

 the object of this may be I do not know, as kissing is unknown among Indians; but the 

 effect is that the lips are protected by a dangerous-looking row of spikes. Similarly the men 

 pierce one hole just under the middle of their lower lips, through which they pass the loop 

 of a string, fastening it inside the mouth, to which is attached a bell-shaped ornament, 

 hanging down over the chin; and they pierce the cartilage of the septum of their noses, 

 from which they suspend a half-moon-shaped ornament. The ears, too, of men, and sometimes 

 of women, are pierced, and pieces of stick or straw passed through the openings." 



Missionary S< 



WAR INDIANS OF THE LENGUA TRIBE. 



