OLD TIME INDIANS. 
THEIR MANNERS AND CUSTOMS. 
By Dr. W. E. Roru, Mepican-Macistrate or THE Pomeroon Disrricr, 
In the absence of sufficient anatomical, especially osteological, data, one of the 
nex best bases for the ethnic classification of the South American races is that 
of linguistics. Where sufficient coincidences of words and grammar in two 
languages are wanted, they are classed as independent stocks or families. There 
are some of these in South America. The most widely disseminated of these 
in th» area drained by the Orinoco and Amazon—an area which chiefly concerns 
the student of the old-time British Guiana Indian—were the Tupis, the Tapuya, 
the Arawak and the Carib. The Tupi—from whose language the more or less 
corrupted native tongue, the so-called “lingua geral,’’ has been derived,— 
were found by the first discoverers along the seaboard from La Plata to the 
Amazon, and far up the stream of the latter. As these Tupi migrated from 
South to North over the Brazils, they replaced the Tapuya, whose stock is at 
once the most ancient and the most extensive now living on the soil of Brazil. 
The Arawak stock of languages, on the other hand, is the most widely disseminated 
of any inSouth America. It begins at the South with the Guianas, on the head- 
water of the Paraguay, and with the Baures and Moxos on the high-lands of 
Southern Bolivia, and thence extends almost in continuity to the most northern 
land of the Southern Continent, and originally went through the Antilles, Greater 
and Lesser, into the Bahamas, while there is historical evidence that about the 
period of the discovery of America, there was an Arawakan colony in Florida. 
Furthermore, the Arawakan tribes probably at one time occupied most of the 
lowlands of Venezuela, whence they were driven by the Caribs not long before 
the discovery of America, as they also were from many of the Southern Islands 
of the West Indian Archipelago. The latter event was then of such recent 
occurrence that the women of the island Caribs, most of whom had been captured 
from the Arawaks, still spoke that tongue. They were thus the first of the 
natives of the New World to receive the visitors from European climes. 
This same Arawak Linguistic stock comprised the Atorais, Tarumas, and 
Wapisianas. At the actual time of the conquest, the Carib dialects were found 
in the Lesser Antilles, the Caribbee islands, and on the mainland from the mouth 
of the Essequebo to the Gulf of Maracaybo. West of the latter, it did not reach 
the coast, nor has any positive traces of its introduction above the Straits of 
Panama, earlier than the conquest, been found, in spite of frequent assertions 
to the contrary. Into the Guianas, the Caribs wandered from the Orinoco 
districts, some inland, some along the coast, and some probably from the large 
island adjacent to the coast. To this Carib stock belong the Akawois, the 
Arecunas, Macusis, etc. The affinities of the Warraus are uncertain—they appear 
fo have a lineage quite other than any of the above ; they would seem to have 
