Strips of bark were
their only dress. The country was a pathless wilderness, with
small cultivated patches of rice and vegetables, or clumps of
fruit-trees, diversifying the otherwise unbroken forest. Their
religion was that naturally engendered in the undeveloped human
mind by the contemplation of grand natural phenomena and the
luxuriance of tropical nature. The burning mountain, the torrent
and the lake, were the abode of their deities; and certain trees
and birds were supposed to have special influence over men's
actions and destiny. They held wild and exciting festivals to
propitiate these deities or demons, and believed that men could
be changed by them into animals - either during life or after
death.
Here we have a picture of true savage life; of small isolated
communities at war with all around them, subject to the wants and
miseries of such a condition, drawing a precarious existence from
the luxuriant soil, and living on, from generation to generation,
with no desire for physical amelioration, and no prospect of
moral advancement.
Such was their condition down to the year 1822, when the coffee-
plant was first introduced, and experiments were made as to its
cultivation. It was found to succeed admirably from fifteen
hundred feet, up to four thousand feet above the sea.
