B8 BUMMAEY PUNISHMENTS. 



Little annexed forms (suffixes) mark the gradations of senti- 

 ment ; and here, as in every language formed by a free deve- 

 lopment, clearness is the result of that regulating instinct 

 which characterises human intelligence in the various stages 

 of barbarism and cultivation. On holidays, after the cele- 

 bration of mass, all the inhabitants ol the village assemble in 

 front oi the church. The young girls place at the feet of the 

 missionary faggots of wood, bunches of plantains, and other 

 provision of which he stands in need for his household. At 

 the same time the goveniador, the alguazil, and other muni- 

 cipal officers, all of whom are Indians, exhort the natives to 

 labour, proclaim the occupations of the ensuing week, repri- 

 mand the idle, and flog the untractable. Strokes of the cane 

 are received with the same insensibility as that with which 

 they are given. It were better if the priest did not impose 

 these corporal punishments at the instant of quitting the altar, 

 and if he were not, in his sacerdotal habits, the spectator of 

 this chastisement of men and women ; but this abuse is inhe- 

 rent in the principle on which the strange government of the 

 missions is founded. The most arbitrary civil power is 

 combined with the authority exercised by the priest over the 

 little community; and, although the Caribs are not cannibals, 

 and we would wish to see them treated with mildness and 

 indulgence, it may be conceived that energetic measures are 

 sometimes necessary to maintain tranquillity in this rising 

 society. 



The difficulty of fixing the Caribs to the soil is the greater, 

 as they have been for ages in the habit of trading on the 

 rivers. We have already described this active people, at 

 once commercial and warlike, occupied in the traffic of slaves, 

 and carrying merchandize from the coasts of Dutch Gruiana 

 to the basin of the Amazon. The travelling Caribs were the 

 Bokharians of equinoctial America. The necessity of count- 

 ing the objects of their little trade, and transmitting intelli- 

 gence, led them to extend and improve the use of the quipos y 

 or, as they are called in the missions, the cordoncillos con 

 nudos (cords with knots). These quipos or knotted cords 

 are found in Canada, in Mexico (where Boturini procured 

 some from the Tlascaltecs), in Peru, in the plains of Guiana, 

 in central Asia, in China, and in India. As rosaries, they 

 have become objects ol devotion in the hands of the Christiana 



