RoTH] FOOD ADJUNCTS ae 
earthen saucepan of hot water, where they sink to the bottom, their 
contained salts being dissolved. In evaporating the solution, freed 
from the ashes, there becomes desposited a white crystalline matter 
composed of different salts of soda and potassium, a substance which 
replaces salt without any inconvenience (Cr, 118). Father Acuna, 
when speaking of the Indians on the Amazon, says that they have 
no great quantity of salt, and that which they use to season their 
meat is very rare with them, and is made only of the ashes of a sort 
of palm tree, so that it is more like saltpeter than common salt 
(AC, 62). In Surimam palm-tree ashes were also employed (St, n, 
115). In the Catalogue of British Guiana Contributions to the Lon- 
don International Exhibition of 1862, page 62, it is stated that the Ac- 
cawai Indians obtain a substitute for salt from the ash of the mid 
rib of the kokerit palm. Wallace, however, on the upper Rio Negro, 
speaks of the Indians obtaining it from the fruit of this same palm, 
as also from the fruit of the Leopoldina major (ARW, 340). Schom- 
burgk says that the Indians prepare a kind of salt from the ashes of the 
burned leaves of the Mauritia flexuosa (ScT, 25). In Cayenne the 
Indians also obtained their requirements by washing the cinders of the 
maripa (kokerit), pineau (?truli), and other palms, and then filtering 
through a cone-shaped basket (PBA, 162). At Yavita, on the Ata- 
bapo, upper Orinoco, a salt is fabricated by the incineration of the 
spadix and fruit of the palm tree seje or chimu (AVH, un, 365). 
Among plants other than palms there is the poluyo, a species of 
Salicornia (?) from which the Guapés and other Indian tribes along 
the Rio Negro prepare this article (ScO, 341). Another source, 
the Polypodium, is mentioned from the Orinoco: “In the trunks 
of the palms grows the polypodium. Its stem is thin and hairy, 
whence the Betoyes call it monkey-arm. Its leaf is like that of 
cabbage; it goes on increasing and sends out roots on one and 
the other side of the palm, whence it draws its sap, and keeps itself 
from falling. . . . The Indians light a fire, and when the wood 
is burned place these roots on the glowing ashes; the charcoal which 
results is saltpeter sufficiently strong for them to put into the earthen 
pot to give it the taste of salt” (G, 1, 273). The remaining plant 
recorded as a salt producer is the weya, weira, weyra, or huya, 
the Mouwrera fluviatilis Aubl., an aquatic plant which is found 
growing on the rocks in many of the rapids in our own colony 
and on which the pacu feeds. The salt obtained by boiling is, when 
erystallized, of a dirty brown color and of a very inferior quality 
(BE, 42; ARW, 340; SR, 1, 497). This mourera may be identical 
with the plants from which caruru salt is obtained (Cou, 1, 169). 
251. According to Bancroft, the Indians used but little salt with 
their food, and until the Europeans visited them they had none, 
except what they sometimes procured by boiling sea water in their 
