A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
‘“ To the solid ground 
Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye.’-—Worpsworth. 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1913. 
NOTES ON THE ABORIGINES OF SOUTH 
AMERICA. 
Aborigines of South America. By the late Colonel 
Ge. Church. Edited by an Old Friend, 
Clements R. Markham, K.C.B. Pp. xix+314. 
(London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1912.) Price 
tos. 6d. net. 
_“Y°HE author of this posthumous work was a 
: descendant of the earliest New England 
colonists. Born in 1835, he became a surveying 
engineer, and his first introduction to South 
‘America was of a kind sufficient to shape his whole 
career. As a member of an expedition sent out 
by the Government of Buenos Aires in 1859 to 
_ explore the south-western frontiers, he partook 
of severe fighting with the then still unsubdued 
Araucanians and Patagones. Then. he served 
through the whole of the Civil War in the United 
States, and next he joined the General Staff of 
Juarez against Maximilian. After that , episode 
we find him in Bolivia, which he reached once by 
Buenos Aires, another time by Peru, busy with 
concessions of the navigation of Bolivian and 
Brazilian rivers. A political mission to Ecuador, 
the building of an Argentine railway, business in 
Panama, Costa Rica, and elsewhere afforded him 
well-nigh unrivalled opportunities of studying land 
and peoples of South America before he settled 
down in London, where he devoted much time ‘to 
his favourite geographical and_ ethnological 
Studies. 
The author’s intention to write a comprehensive 
"work on the aborigines of South America was 
frustrated by his death in 1910, and only the less 
incomplete chapters have been edited by his friend, 
‘Sir C. R. Markham, himself a traveller in those 
-parts of the world. They are apparently not so 
NO. 2288. vot. a2l 
much notes by the experienced, observant traveller 
as critical, carefully sifted extracts from the 
| numerous accounts of previous explorers, whose 
| dominant race made its 
accounts alone can bear upon the “history ” of 
these wild, roaming, barbaric tribes. In many 
cases the bewildering number of names, mostly 
nicknames bestowed upon each other by the 
various clans and muddled by the Europeans, have 
been reduced to synonymic order. Presumably 
all the aborigines of the whole continent are of 
one stock, but time and separation and environ- 
ment have diversified them. One of the most 
vigorous were the Caraios, Caraibes, Guaranis, or 
Tupis, with their origin in Paraguay, whence this 
influence felt from La 
Plata to Orinoco and spread even to the Antilles. 
Several chapters are devoted to the unravelling 
| of the resulting dislodgment of the coast-tribes 
of Brazil and those of Amazonia, and to the 
troubles brought upon them by the Portuguese 
and Spaniards. The scanty notes made by the 
white man, not always well educated, be he 
soldier, trader, or missionary, about customs, 
arms, and ornaments, are often the only facts 
known about many a so-called tribe. 
Within late Tertiary periods the whole continent 
seems to have been divided into an eastern and 
a western half, from Uruguay to the Orinoco, by a 
system of enormous lakes. Our author evidently 
believed that such a division still existed when 
man already inhabited South America, before the 
Pampean and Amazonian inland seas and other 
lakes, of which Titicaca is a remnant, had yet 
been drained by the present great river systems. 
This somewhat rash idea is on a par with the 
suggestion that South America may have been 
connected with Africa or Australia via Antarctica 
at a period when climatic conditions made these 
dreamlands a pleasant abode for man and thus 
account for the puzzling origin of the Patagonians. 
B 
