THE BOTOCUDO LIP ORNAMENTATION.
THE Botocudos are a rapidly disappearing tribe of Brazilian Indians. They inhabit the country along the upper portion of the Rio Doce, about three hundred miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro, and the region lying along the borders of the States of Bahia, Espirito Santo, and Minas Geraes, especially between the Rio Doce and Rio Pardo, and along the Sierra dos Aymorés. Although they are now in contact with civilization and fast yielding to and dying out before its influences, it is not many years since they and the various branches of their great family occupied a large portion of Southern Brazil, and were justly looked upon as the most ferocious of all the wild tribes of that country. But few travelers have seen anything of them, and these have observed only the straggling outskirts, as it were, of their tribe. Even to this day the latest and best maps of Brazil have written broadly across the vast region referred to, "But little known, and inhabited by Indians." In these dense and almost impenetrable forests they spend their lives, seldom or never visiting either the campos of the interior or the coast. To judge of the stage of civilization of these Indians, it is worth while knowing that they cannot count, and that their reckoning is done by using the fingers and toes, and that even this does not go beyond twenty. The children are dirt eaters and are sold for slaves, often for the merest trifles. Formerly these people wore no clothing at all; nowadays, they are coming more and more to use it. Their straight, deep black hair, high cheek bones, flat noses, complexion, and stature are all suggestive of the Mongolian race types. An ancient custom among them is that of wearing large and broad lip and ear ornaments. The opening in the lower lip is made when the person is quite young, by piercing it with a long, slender thorn that grows on a kind of palm tree; this is enlarged with the point of a deer's horn, and a stick or a small stone is inserted and the wound greased with salve. These openings are gradually enlarged by forcing bigger and bigger plugs into them, until the desired size is reached. It was formerly the custom when the young men were old enough to bear arms that the openings were enlarged and the green stone labrets inserted. The lip ornament is of two very different forms, one broad and stopper-shaped, the other long and rudely T-shaped. Several writers tell of the use of stones for labrets. Jean de Lery speaks of polished bone, white as ivory, used by the big boys, and replaced when they are grown by green stones. Many are made of clay and formed like pottery, while the ornaments in most common use now are made of wood. The ear ornaments are not essentially different from those worn in the lips. The plugs are of the same materials, size, and appearance. They differ only in that they are worn in openings made in the lobes of the ears instead of in the lower lip.—Popular Science Monthly.