Note 963 — Chapter VII · WILD TRIBES OF CENTRAL AMERICA.
Reading edition
The Lacandones have 'floating gardens which can navigate the lagoons like bolsas,' and are often inhabited. They have stone sepulchres highly sculptured. Pontelli, in Cal. Farmer, Nov. 7, 1862. 'In these ancient Chontales villages the houses were in the centre, and the tombs, placed in a circle around.... The Indians who before the Spanish conquest inhabited Nicaragua did not construct any large temples or other stone buildings.' Pim and Seemann's Dottings, pp. 126-7. They live like their forefathers 'in buildings precisely similar ... some huts of a single room will monopolise an acre of land.' Boyle's Ride, vol. ii., pp. 6-8; Gage's New Survey, pp. 318-19; Scherzer, Wanderungen, pp. 75, 430, 496; Puydt, Rapport, in Amérique Centrale, pp. 69-70; Valois, Mexique, p. 278; Benzoni, Hist. Mondo Nuovo, fol. 86, 102; Froebel's Cent. Amer., pp. 89, 96; Dollfus and Mont-Serrat, Voy. Géologique, pp. 19, 55; Herrera, Hist. Gen., dec. iii., lib. iv., cap. vii.; Berendt, in Smithsonian Rept., 1867, p. 425; West und Ost Indischer Lustgart, pt. ii., pp. 380, 390; Valenzuela, in Squier's Cent. Amer., p. 566.