ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
pronoun, sometimes after the verb, the words modde, 
uo, or ua . 
At the end of the second volume, in the Appendix, 
will be found a vocabulary of useful words needed in 
daily conversation which I collected during tny visit to 
the Bororos. I had made a much more complete dic¬ 
tionary of their language, in a book which I kept for the 
purpose, but unfortunately the book was lost with a great 
many other things, in an accident I had some months later 
on the Arinos River. 
It was not possible to say that the Bororos shone in 
intelligence. It was seldom one found an individual who 
could count beyond two. Everything in the Bororo 
country was reckoned in couples, with the aid of fingers, 
thumbs, and toes. The learned could thus reach up to 
twenty, or ten pair, but beyond twenty no Bororo dared 
venture in his calculations. They had no written lan¬ 
guage, no sculptures or paintings, no carved idols. Their 
artistic talent seemed limited to occasionally incising 
rudimentary representations of horns, footprints, and line 
figures on rocks. 
They showed great skill in the manufacture of their 
arrows, which were indeed constructed on most scientific 
lines, and were turned out with wonderful workmanship. 
The arrows were from four to five feet long, and were 
chiefly remarkable for the intelligent and highly scientific 
disposition of the two balancing parrot feathers, gently 
bent into a well-studied spiral curve, so as to produce a 
rotary movement, united with perfect balance, in the 
travelling weapon. The arrows were manufactured out 
of hard, beautifully polished black or white wood, and 
were provided with a point of bamboo one third the length 
of the entire arrow. That bamboo point was tightly 
fastened to the rod by means of a careful and very 
precisely made contrivance of split cane fibre. 
The Bororos used various-shaped arrow-heads, some 
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