MIGRATIONS OF RACES 
thirty members. If the tribe numbered fifty individuals, it 
was already a large tribe. Most of them contained merely 
six or eight members. So that really, in the population of 
Brazil, these tribes, instead of being the chief factor, were 
in fact a negligible quantity. It would be rash to make 
a statement as to the exact number of wild Indians in 
Brazil, for in a country so big, larger, as I have already 
stated, than the United States of America, Germany, 
Portugal, and a few other States taken together — and 
most of which was little known or absolutely unknown — 
it was not easy to produce an exact census. 
During my journey, which crossed that immense 
country in a zigzag from one end to the other in its 
broader width, and covered all the most important regions 
of the Republic, I became assured that few indeed were 
the pure Indians to be found in Central Brazil. One went 
hundreds and hundreds of miles without meeting signs 
of them; and that in localities where they were supposed 
to be swarming. The Bororos, a few dozens of them, all 
counted, in two or three different subdivisions, were per¬ 
haps the strongest wild tribe in all the immense State 
of Matto Grosso. 
As I have said, I was greatly impressed, from my 
first contact with the Bororos, by the strongly Polynesian 
appearance of some of them. The more specimens I saw, 
the more I became convinced that they were of the same 
race. In fact, I began to speculate whether the people 
of Australia and Polynesia had migrated here or whether 
it was just the other way, which theory might also be 
plausibly upheld, viz.: that the people of Central South 
America had migrated to the west, into Polynesia and 
Australia. Many theories have been expounded of how 
races always follow certain rules in their migrations, 
but in my own experience I find that those theories 
are not invariably correct. Again, it does not do to 
rely too much on the resemblance of words in establishing 
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