1875.] O-O [Ga'^b. 



When collected it looks like milk. It is caused to coagulate and turn 

 black by the juice of a species of convolvulus. It is generally made into 

 cakes a little over a foot long, about eight inches wide and an inch thick. 



It is with these two articles, and an occasional deer skin, that all the 

 purchases are made from the traders. They buy various kinds of cotton 

 cloth for clothing, colored handkerchiefs, needles, thread, machetes, 

 axes, knives, iron kettles and pots, a few medicines, and powder, shot, • 

 and caps. Their intertribal trade is still more limited. The Bri-bris sell 

 net-bags and hammocks to the Tiribis, and formerly made the large cot- 

 ton blankets, already described, for sale in Terraba. They buy in Ter- 

 raba cows and dogs, murex-shell whistles, murex-dyed cotton, and beads 

 made by rubbing down a small sjiecies of shell of the genus Conus. 

 Sometimes both the Bri-bris and Cabecars, but especially the latter, carry 

 sarsaparilla or rubber a hard ten-days' journey to Matina, to exchange it 

 for cicio, of which they might have euough and to spare for the mere 

 trouble of planting it. But Indians are, almost without exception, a lazy, 

 miserable, and unimprovable race. 



It i« perhaps advisable to state that the whole of the present memoir 

 was written in Costa Rica, and it was not until my return to Philadel- 

 phia, that I encountered the elaborate compila,tion of Bancroft, on "the 

 Native Races of the Pacific States." At the date of the present writing, 

 but three volumes of the promised five have made their app^ai-ancp. 

 While I regret that the information in that work, on the present field is 

 so meagre, and in some respects so different from my own observations, 

 I have said nothing which I wish either to retract or modify. I state 

 nothing but what I have seen and learned while living among the people 

 whom I describe. At the same time I trust that I may not be accused 

 of a spirit of antagonism, in pointing out some of the more serious errors 

 in the work in question, and which, if not corrected, might seriously 

 mislead future students. 



Vol I. Chapter VII. p. 684, et seq. is devoted to "the wild tribes of 

 Central America," and the Indians living below Lake Nicaragua, and 

 the San Juan River are here designated as Isthmians ; an apjjropriate 

 name, since the family seems to cover all of Costa Rica and most, if not 

 all of the State of Panama. But the map, facing p. 684 is utterly incor- 

 rect in so far, at least, as it px'ofesses to give the distribution of the In- 

 dians of Costa Rica. 



The region of Talamanca described by me, as containing the three 

 tribes of Cabecars, Bri-bris, and Tiribis, and known to the Spaniards 

 under the generic term of Blancos, is here given up to the Valientes, who 

 should be placed to the south and south-east of the Chiriqui lagoon ; and 

 the Ramas, who live in Nicaragua, back of the Mosquito coast. The 

 centi'al plateau, in which are situated the cities and towns of Atenas, 

 San Ramon, Alajuela, Heredia, San Jose, Cartago^ &c., in short, that 

 occupied by practically the entire Hispano- American population of Costa 

 Rica, is here given to the Blancos, and on the shores of the Gulf of 



