562 General Notes. 
to visit all countries of the earth and perform miracles. This belief 
makes these Indians very accessible to a future conversion to Chris- 
tianism; but the Catholic missionaries were not successful with 
them up to this day, because they neglected to use the main impulse 
for civilizing savages: to make them work and earn money. 
Tae MorTILONES! are an Indian nation scattered in numerous 
bands or tribes through the Eastern Columbian and the Western 
Venezuelan States, many living south of the Lake of Maracaibo. 
The Motilones living in the forests and swamps between Zulia and 
Cesar Rivers, on the border line between the two confederacies, have 
been very dangerous neighbors to the white settlements ever since 
the conquest. The name is equivalent to “ pelon,” baldheaded, and 
also applies to a denomination of monks, who tonsured their hair 
so as to appear almost baldheaded. It is, therefore, not a name 
belonging necessarily to one tribe or race only, and indeed we find 
it repeated in several parts of South America. From 1779 to 1792 
the Spanish domination established ten missions among the Moti- 
lones on the Zulia, of which even the last trace has disappeared in our 
days. Dr. A. Ernst, Director of the Ethnologic Museum in Caracas, 
Venezuela, and one of the few men of education who are active 
in the furtherance of South American anthropology, obtained from 
General B. T. Velasco the skull of a Motilone man, about forty-five 
years old, for measurement. He found it to be chameeprosopic a 
but a little hypsicpehalic, the index for length and width being 
9.9. He describes the skull, adding to his accurate measurements 
all what is known about the tribe of the Motilones. i 
At the same session a report by A. Ernst was read concerning 
the language of the Tucurá Indians in the Columbian States. 
Tucurá is a settlement upon the Upper Sinu, at the mouth of Rio 
Verde, and these Indians form a population of about seventy. , The 
vocabulary obtained from the traveller, F. A. A. Simons, 1s printed 
in the Verhandlungen, p. 302, and contains some Carib terms, many 
of the terms being oxytonized. 
wo weeks later, another communication from Dr. A. Ernst was ~ 
f the Motilon 
as 
lungen of May 7, 1887, pp. 376-378. 
1 . , ae a Hechatft. April 
* Verhandlungen der Berliner Anthropolog Ge batt, “I 
28, 1887. 
