30 
DOTTINGS ON THE ROADSIDE. [Chap. II.—B. S. 
copper), and buried their dead in stone cists, accom¬ 
panied by their weapons, ornaments, pottery, and other 
household articles.* 
From information received during my two visits to 
Chiriqui, and from what has been published since I 
first drew attention to this subject, I am led to be¬ 
lieve that there are a great many inscribed rocks in 
that district.')' But I myself have seen only one, the 
now famous piedra pintal (i.e. painted stone), which 
* This very same people, supposed to have been the Dorachos or 
Dorazques, had also made considerable progress in sculpturing co¬ 
lumns, and placing on them raised characters. Several of these co¬ 
lumns, 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 on Muertro, and other places. Eaised 
characters 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 piedra pintal , and other 
stones of which it is the type, are assumed to have been the same 
as those who expressed them in raised characters on the columns of 
which I saw specimens at David, a long period must have elapsed 
before tools could be brought to such perfection as to allow the em¬ 
ployment of inscriptions 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 prac¬ 
tised ; 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 record¬ 
ing their ideas. It is, therefore, scarcely possible to escape the con¬ 
clusion that the incised characters were by a different, less civilized 
and more ancient race than the characters in relief. 
f See Bollaert, ‘ Ancient Tombs of Chiriqui, 5 in Journ. Ethnol. Soc., 
vol. ii, pp. 151, 159. 
