all. If
we come to dividing out the various tribes which have been or still are
existing in the country, we can count over a hundred and fifty, with
from fifty to a hundred distinct languages among them.

Out of this immense variety of tribes, we can make one great
classification. The men of one race are brown in complexion, and have
been for ages cultivators of the land. It is among them only that the
Mexican civilization sprang up, and they still remain in the country,
having acquiesced in the authority of the Europeans, and to a great
extent mingled with them by marriage. This class includes the Aztecs,
Acolhuans, Chichemecs, Zapotecs, &c., the old Toltecs, the present
Indians of Central America, and, if we may consider them to be the same
race, the nations who huilt the now ruined cities of Palenque, Copan,
Uxmal, and so forth. The other race is that of the Red Indians who
inhabit the prairie-states of North Mexico, such as the Apaches,
Comanches, and Navajos. They are hunters, as they always were, and they
will never preserve their existence by adopting agriculture as their
regular means of subsistence, and settling in peace among the white
men. As it has been with their countrymen further north, so it will be
with them; a few years more, and the Americans will settle Chihuahua
and Sonora, and we shall only know these tribes by specimens of their
flint arrow-heads and their pipes in collections of curiosities, and
their skulls in ethnological cabinets.

One of the strangest races (or varieties, I cannot say which) are the
_Pintos_ of the low lands towards the Pacific coast. A short time
before we were in the country General Alvarez had quartered a whole
regiment of them in the capital; but when we were there they had
returned with their commander into the tierra caliente towards
Acapulco. They are called _"Pintos"_ or painted men, from their faces
and bodies being marked with great daubs of deep blue, like our British
ancestors; but here the decoration is natural and cannot be effaced.

They have the reputation of being a set of most ferocious savages; and,
badly armed as they are with ricketty flint- or match-locks, and sabres
of hoop-iron, they are the terror of the other Mexican soldiery,
especially when the war has to be carried on in the hot pestilential
coast-region, their native country.

CHAR XII.

CHALCHICOMULA. JALAPA. VERA CRUZ. CONCLUSION.

[Illustration: INDIANS OF THE PLATEAU. _(After Nebel.)_