United States or Vietnam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Squier, who tells us more of them than any other explorer, says, “I heard of remains and monuments in Honduras and San Salvador equal to those of Copan in extent and interest.” He mentions the ruins of Opico, near San Vincente, in San Salvador, which “cover nearly two square miles, and consist of vast terraces, ruins of edifices, circular and square towers, and subterranean galleries, all built of cut stones: a single carving has been found here on a block of stone.” Remains of “immense works” exist in the district of Chontales, near the northern shore of Lake Nicaragua; and pottery found in Nicaragua “equals the best specimens of Mexico and Peru.” Don Jose Antonio Urritia, curé of Jutiapa, gave the following account of a great ruin on a mountain in San Salvador, near the town of Comapa: it is called Cinaca-Mecallo: “The walls, or remains of the city wall, describe an oval figure, within which roads or streets may be traced, and there are various subterranean passages and many ruined edifices.
I have gone through the central provinces, Chontales, Matagalpa, and Segovia; from the San Juan river, the south-eastern boundary of Nicaragua, away to the confines of Honduras on the north-west. I now propose to leave the central provinces, amongst which we have so long lingered, and to describe one of my journeys to those lying between the great lakes and the Pacific.
About one o'clock we reached rather a large river, and after crossing it came in sight of the town of Acoyapo, one of the principal towns of the province of Chontales. we stayed and had dinner with Senor Don Dolores Bermudez, a Nicaraguan gentlemen who had been educated in the States, and spoke English fluently.
And the resemblance of their traditions of four epochs of destruction and of the dispersion of mankind after a great flood of waters, arose from the fact that the great catastrophes that befell the human race at the melting of the ice of the glacial period were universal over the world. Return to Santo Domingo. The birds of Chontales. The insects of Chontales. Mimetic forms.
We, however, soon found fragments of two broken cinerary urns, one of fine clay, painted with red and black, the other much coarser and stronger, without ornament. The custom of the Chontales Indians appears to have been to burn their dead, and place the ashes in a thin painted urn, inclosed within a stronger one.
Seemann died at Javali; and when Belt went to read the Burial Service over him, as was his custom upon the death of any European, the monkey sprang upon him and, seizing him by the neck, clung to him with all his might. So determined was he to adopt Belt as his protector that the matter ended by his being taken back to Chontales where he lived in great contentment.
The tops of the stones on either side are covered with a number of concentric rings and ovals, crossed with lines. He considers them to be symbols full of meaning, and recording ideas held to be of vital importance to the people who used them, and whose names have become a matter of doubt. In the district of Chontales, a vast number of ancient tombs are met with in almost every direction.
R. Spruce describes a migration which he witnessed on the Amazon, in November 1849, of the common white and yellow butterflies. I know of no satisfactory explanation of these immense migrations. They occurred every year whilst I was in Chontales, and always in the same direction.
Establishment of the Chontales Gold-Mining Company. My house and garden. Fruits. Plantains and bananas; probably not indigenous to America: propagated from shoots: do not generally mature their seeds. Fig-trees. Granadillas and papaws. Vegetables. Dependence of flowers on insects for their fertilisation. Insect plagues. Leaf-cutting ants: their method of defoliating trees: their nests.
Altogether, only one hundred and fifty species, including those that I had collected, were known from Nicaragua. Fragmentary as our knowledge is, it is sufficient, in Mr. Salvin's opinion, to indicate, with tolerable accuracy, to which of the two sub-provinces of the Central American fauna the forest region of Chontales belongs.
Word Of The Day