1 14 TlMEHR!. 
Perhaps basing my ideas too much on the state of affairs 
which now prevails, and seems once to have obtained 
exclusively, in Guiana and generally on the Spanish 
main, where the universal foodstuff is cassava, which is 
prepared, not by pounding, or rubbing but by grating and 
squeezing, I was at one time doubtful whether com 
(maize) had been in common use in the Antilles pre- 
vious to the discovery of these islands by Europeans. 
The number of pounders and mullers, presumed to have 
been used for crushing maize, which occur, together 
with the corresponding fact that almost exactly 
similar implements are yet in great and almost universal 
use in Mexico and Central America for crushing corn, 
certainly seemed strong evidence against my view. It is 
not however, conclusive. Other food substances than 
maize — not to speak of other matters, such as paints and 
dyes — may have been crushed with these pounders. For 
instance, to this day some few of the better class of True 
Caribs in Guiana pound their cassava before baking it, 
thereby greatly improving the quality of their bread. 
But if maize was not the universal bread-stuff in the 
West Indian islands then cassava pretty surely was ; 
and these islands (from which, rather than from Guiana, 
most of these pounders come) were almost certainly the 
head-quarters of the Carib tribes, a few of whom, com- 
paratively shortly before the arrival of Europeans, found 
their way into Guiana. It is just possible that the West 
Indian Caribs used these pounders for crushing cassava, 
not maize. But, on the whole it is a far more probable 
assumption — I am here not prepared to assert it as in any 
way a certainty — that the West Indian Caribs, whose civi- 
lization seems to have been above that of the cassava-eaters, 
