RATT.i EOCK-SCULPTURES IN CHIRIQUI. 67 



omitted, the publisher objecting to them on account of the expense; but 

 some of tliem were afterward placed by me at the disposal of Mr. Bollaert, 

 and published by that gentleman in his 'Antiquities, etc, of South America, 

 (London, 1860), whilst others have been, it is feared, entirely lost, especially 

 those which would have established the identity of the British and Chiriqui 

 inscriptions beyond doubt in the minds of others. For m}^ own part, I was 

 so much struck with the general resemblance, not to say identity, of the two, 

 that when the plates of Mr. Tate's work were first shown to me, and I was 

 quite ignorant to what country they related, I fully believed them to rep- 

 resent Chiriqui rock-inscriptions. Even from the drawings I still retain of 

 a Chiriqui rock I am able to pick out some of the most typical characters 

 found on the British rocks, as the accompanying diagrams — here Fig. 58 — 

 will show.* 



" The characters in Chiriqui are, like those of Great Britain, incised on 

 large stones, the surface of which has not previously undergone any smooth- 

 ing process. The incised stones occur in a district of Veraguas (Chiriqui 

 or Alanje), which is now thinly inhabited, but which, judging from the 

 numerous tombs, was once densely peopled by a nation which became 

 known to Columbus in his fourth voyage of discovery, manufactured some 

 elegantly-shaped pottery, wore ornaments made of gold of a low standard, 

 called quanin, and buried their dead in stone cists, accompanied by their 

 weapons, ornaments, pottery, and other household articles.! 



* The explanations accompanying Fig. 58 are likewise Dr. Seemann's. 



+ Dr. Seemaun adds here the following note : ' This very same people, supposed to have been the 

 Dorachos or Dorazqnes, had also made considerable progress in sculpturing columns, and placing on them 

 raised characters. Several of these columns, about ten to twelve feet long, were knocking about the 

 streets of David, the capital of Alanje, or Chiriqui, during my visit in 1848, and numbers are said to 

 occur iu other places. Raised char.icters require, of course, more artistic skill than incised ones, and 

 hence denote a higher degree of civilization. If, therefore, the people who readily engraved their 

 thoughts on the picdra inntal, and other stones of which it is the type, are assumed to have been the 

 same as those who expressed them in raised characteis on the columns of which I saw specimens aS 

 David, a long jieriod must have elapsed before tools could be brought to such perfection as to allow the 

 employment of iuscriptions in relief. But there is no identity of, or even distant resemblance between, 

 the incised and raised characters, and we need, therefore, not trouble ourselves any further about this 

 point. The identity of the two being abandoned, it may just be worth while to consider the possibility 

 of their being executed by contemporaries. In highly civilized countries, such as ancient India, Egypt, 

 and modern Europe, different modes of expressing thought have been and are practised; but the most 

 advanced people who ever inhabited Chiriqui had not attained so high a degree of civilization as would 

 justify us in assuming that they resorted to two entirely different systems of recording their ideas. It 

 is, therefore, scarcely jjossiblo to escape the conclusion that the incised characters were by a diftercnt, 

 less civilized, and more ancient race than the characters in relief.' 



