ANTIQUITIES. 
127 
Chap. VIII.—B. S.] 
these venerable relics. Men of science will, therefore, 
find about Juigalpa, San Diego, Libertad, and other 
places a sufficiently large number to enable them to 
throw some light upon the stone age of these extinct 
tribes. 
The Indians who before the Spanish conquest in¬ 
habited Nicaragua did not construct any large tem¬ 
ples or other stone buildings, as some of the other 
natives of Central America have done. But in some 
parts they cut stone figures of considerable dimen¬ 
sions, some of them reminding us of those of Easter 
Island, in the Pacific. These stone figures, often of 
colossal size, are of two different descriptions,—those 
which closely represent the human figure in dignified 
repose, and have a mild, inoffensive expression of 
countenance, and those which do not so closely repre¬ 
sent the human figure, often a combination between 
man and animal, and have a wild, terrifying expres¬ 
sion of countenance. Illustrations of both, from 
Mr. George Chambers’s sketches, are given. Some 
people have supposed that the mild-looking figures 
