The Botocudos are cannibals, like many other American tribes. After a battle they feast upon the dead bodies of their enemies, but more, it seems, from a spirit of vindictive rage than from a depraved taste for human flesh.
When a Botocudo dies he is quickly buried in or near his hut, and then the place is forsaken. On the first day the tribe shows its grief by a wild howling, but on the second it pursues its usual occupations. No food, or weapon, or ornament is interred with the corpse, but for some time a fire is kindled on each side of the grave, to scare away the evil spirit ‘Tanchon,’ who would otherwise rob it of its contents. From fear of this imaginary being the fierce Botocudo, who trembles at nothing that lives, is afraid to sleep alone in the forest, and anxiously seeks before night the society of his comrades.
THE MEXICAN PLATEAUS, AND THE SLOPES OF SIKKIM.
Geological Formation of Mexico--The _Tierra Caliente_--The _Tierra Templada_--The _Tierra Fria_.
The Sylvan Wonders of Sikkim--Changes of the Forest on ascending--The Torrid Zone of Vegetation--The Temperate Zone The Coniferous Belt-- Limits of Arboreal Vegetation--Animal Life.
The prodigious height attained in the torrid zone, not only by single mountains, but by vast tracts of land, and the diminution of temperature which is the necessary consequence of their elevation above the level of the sea, enable the inhabitants of many tropical countries, without leaving their native land, to view the vegetable forms of every zone, and to pluck nearly every fruit that is found between the equator and the arctic circle. In Asia, Africa, and America, in the islands of the Indian Archipelago, and in the Hawaiian group, where the Mauna Loa towers to the height of Mont Blanc, and girdles his foot with palms, while snow rests for a great part of the year upon his summit, we find numerous examples of a rapid transition from the torrid to the temperate or frigid zone, often within the range of a single day’s journey.
It would far exceed my limits were I to attempt to follow all these gradations of climate throughout the wide extent of the tropics; but a short description of the Mexican plateaus, and of the slopes of Sikkim, which I have selected as remarkable instances of the wonderful change of vegetation resulting from the progressive elevation of the land, will, I hope, prove not uninteresting to the reader.
