never see an impudent air, an insolent look, or any exhibition of immodesty, or hear coarse, abusive or indecent language. In their mutual intercourse they are respectful, and, while good humoured and open, habitually reflective and considerate. They are much given to amusements of various kinds, fond of music, poetry and romances, and in their common conversation addicted to sententions, remarks, proverbs, and metrical sentiments or allusions. To the first impression of the European, the inhabitants, like the vegetation and animals of the Archipelago, are altogether strange, because the characteristics in which they differ from those to which we are habituated, affect the senses more vividly than those in which they agree. For a time the colour, features, dress, manners and habits which we see and the languages which we hear, are those of a new world, But with the fresh charms, the exagegerated impressions also, of novelty, wear away; and then, retracing our steps, we wonder that people so widely separated from the nations of the west, both geographically and historically, and really differing so much in their outward aspect, should, in their more latent traits, so much resemble them. The nearer we come to the inner spirit of humanity, the more points of agreement appear, and this not merely in the possession of the universal attributes of human nature, but in specific habits, usages, and superstations.
What at first seems stranger still is, that when we seek the native of the Archipelago in the mountains of the interior, where he has lived for probably more than two thousand years secluded from all foreign influence, and where we expect to find all the differences at their maximum, we are sometimes astonished to find him approximating most closely of all to the European. In the Jakún, for instance, girded though his loins are with terap bark, and armed as he is with his sumpitan and poisoned arrows, we recognize the plain and clownish manners, and simple ideas of the uneducated peasant in the more secluded parts of European countries; and when he describes how, at his merry makings, his neighbours assemble, the arrack tampúí flows around, and the dance, in which both sexes mingle, is prolonged, till each seats himself on the ground with his partner on his knee and his bambu of arrack by the side, when the dance gives place to song, we are
