ith his own hands
or ordered to be butchered many hundreds of them. Their implements and
domestic utensils are all of wood; their only weapons are reed spears
and bows and arrows. Their dwellings are rough shelters of leaf and
bast, seldom 4 ft. high. So far as the language of the Botocudos is
known, it would appear that they have no means of expressing the
numerals higher than one. Their only musical instrument is a small
bamboo nose-flute. They attribute all the blessings of life to the
"day-fire" (sun) and all evil to "night-fire" (moon). At the graves of
the dead they keep fires burning for some days to scare away evil
spirits, and during storms and eclipses arrows are shot into the sky to
drive away demons.

The most conspicuous feature of the Botocudos is the _tembeitera_, or
wooden plug or disk which is worn in the lower lip and the lobe of the
ear. This disk, made of the specially light and carefully dried wood of
the barriguda tree (_Chorisia ventricosa_), is called by the natives
themselves _embure_, whence Augustin Saint Hilaire suggests the probable
derivation of their name Aimbore (_Voyages dans l'interieur du Bresil
1816-1821_, Paris, 1830). It is worn only in the under-lip, now chiefly
by women, but formerly by men also. The operation for preparing the lip
begins often as early as the eighth year, when an initial boring is made
by a hard pointed stick, and gradually extended by the insertion of
larger and larger disks or plugs, sometimes at last as much as 3 in. in
diameter. Notwithstanding the lightness of the wood the _tembeitera_
weighs down the lip, which at first sticks out horizontally and at last
becomes a mere ring of skin around the wood. Ear-plugs are also worn, of
such size as to distend the lobe down to the shoulders. Ear-ornaments of
like nature are common in south and even central America, at least as
far north as Honduras. When Columbus discovered this latter country
during his fourth voyage (1502) he named part of the seaboard _Costa de
la Oreja_, from the conspicuously distended ears of the natives. Early
Spanish explorers also gave the name _Orejones_ or "big-eared" to
several Amazon tribes.

See A.R. Wallace, _Travels on the Amazon_ (1853-1900); H.H. Bancroft,
_Hist. of Pacific States_ (San Francisco, 1882), vol. i. p. 211; A.H.
Keane, "On the Botocudos" in _Journ. Anthrop. Instit._ vol. xiii.
(1884); J.R. Peixoto, _Novos Estudios Craniologicos sobre os Botocuds_
(Rio Janeir