The Indians of Guiana

Abstract

GENERALLY speaking, the books of travel on which anthropologists have to depend for information as to the less cultured tribes of mankind are descriptions of a country and its exploration, with a chapter or two on the natives. Here the plan is reversed, the main book being a treatise on Caribs and Arawaks, to which is prefaced a short but lively description of the forests and savannahs of Guiana, with their plants and animals, forming as it were a frame in which to set the human picture. When Mr. Im Thurn first went to Guiana in 1877, he spent much of his two years' stay in wanderings among the Indians, and before the end of 1881 went back to the colony, where he is now Resident Magistrate of the Pomeroon District. Such appointments are much to be commended, on the one hand as putting the indigenous tribes under the control and protection of an official thoroughly conversant with native character and custom, on the other hand as placing a scientific man in intimate relations with the fast disappearing culture of the lower races.

Among the Indians of Guiana: being Sketches chiefly Anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana.

By Everard F. Im Thurn Oxon. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1883.)