February 17, 19 16] 



NATURE 



679 



bv so many travellers' accounts, which give the 

 impression as if they were the most accomplished 

 of linguists. Our author, however, tells us upon 

 what slender links his verbal information some- 

 times depended ; English John, the negro, knew 

 Witoto well, and one of the Witotos of the party 

 knew a little Andotu, a tribe from which original 

 information was wanted. In such a roundabout, 

 laborious way some of the vocabularies and 

 phrases published in the book had to be com- 

 piled. 



Our traveller does not give a glowing account 

 t)f the dreary monotony, discomfort, and ever- 

 present danger in the bush, "the weary stretches 

 of inundated country and sweating swamp, where 

 you pass with an unexpected plunge from ankle- 

 deep mire to unbottomed main stream. The 

 eternal sludge 

 without a stone or 

 honest yard of 

 solid ground 

 makes one long 

 for the lesser 

 strain of more 

 definite dangers or 

 of more obtrusive 

 horrors. The 

 horror of Amazon- 

 ian travel is the 

 horror of t h e 

 unseen. It is not 

 the pursuit of un- 

 friendly natives 

 that wears one 

 down ; it is the 

 absence of all sign 

 ■ human life. 



ily the silent 

 ...c;ssage of a 

 poisoned arrow or 

 a leaf-roofed pit- 

 fall tells of their 

 existence some- 

 where in the 

 tangled u n d e r- 

 growth." "Game 

 being always hard 

 to shoot in the 

 bush, and fish, if 



plentiful, hard to catch, the real fear of starvation, 

 after, perhaps, the ghastly dread of being lost, is 

 the greatest cause of anxiety." The necessity of 

 'living to carry rifles and food (half of the tinned 



)visions turned out to be had) forced him to 



ivel without a tent ! 



The present book is not a story of travel, 

 scenery, and adventure ; in fact, not an account 

 of what the author did, but a series of reports 

 of observations concerning the natives in every 

 respect — their physical conditions, mode of life, 

 beliefs, folklore, languages, music, implements, 

 customs ; and most of the respective chapters are 

 written and self-criticised from the wider point of 

 comparison with other peoples of other lands, and 

 NO. 2416, VOL. 96] 



thus this many-sided work will prove of great 

 value to the student of anthropology. Only a few 

 instances can here be mentioned. The Japura 

 tribe carefully retain the teeth of the slain, to be 

 made into necklaces as a visible and abiding token 

 of accomplished revenge. This removal of the 

 ~feeth may be held synonymous with the curse 

 of many savage tribes in reference to their 

 enemies, "Let their teeth be broken"; c/. also 

 King David, and possibly the reason is a reversion 

 in thought to the time when teeth were man's 

 only weapon. 



A large number of spider-monkeys were ob- 

 served, with tails so prehensile that they served 

 as additional hands to convey fruit to their 

 mouths. Some tribes consider it beast-like, un- 

 clean, to eat birds* eggs, although they eat those 



of turtles and the combing of their own head-fauna. 

 There is a tribal hot-pot over the chief's fire in 

 the big communal house to which all the un- 

 married men must contribute, besides the in- 

 dividual family hot-pots. The newborn child is 

 washed and ducked in the river ; if it is not strong 

 enough for this drastic treatment, it had better 

 die; large families not l^eing wanted, there is a 

 vigorous weeding-out, after birth, females first. 



Besides a large map, and a small one for the 

 chapter on languages and dialects of these very 

 locally and sparsely populated wildernesses, the 

 book is embellished with many, mostly excellent, 

 photographs, which are a record of industry and 

 patience where films proved useless on account of 



