Studies in Jamaica archæology and history naturally fall into three main groups: Aboriginal, Spanish and English. Though, owing to the high form of civilization there attained, research has in Egypt revealed very full information concerning the condition of life in the Nile valley thousands of years before the Christian era, it has hitherto told us very little about the aborigines who inhabited Jamaica a little more than 400 years ago. How long they had been here when Columbus discovered the island no one can say for certain, though the thickness and extent of their middens, some thirty of which have been opened from time to time, offer evidence of value. [Illustration: ARAWÂK BOWL ] As in Hispaniola, the natives of Jamaica were ruled over by caciques or chieftains. The estimates of historians of the number of inhabitants in the West Indian islands differ widely. Las Casas says that the islands abounded with inhabitants as an ant-hill with ants, and puts them down at 6,000,000. But Peter Martyr gives but 1,200,000 to Hispaniola and, taking this as a guide, there would probably have been about 600,000 in Jamaica—or, roughly speaking, three-quarters of its present population. Not many were left when the English took the island in 1655. Judged by the English standard, Indians are short in stature. The Arawâks of Guiana to-day are described as being of a red cinnamon in colour. The hair on the scalp is thick, long, very straight and very black. The features of the face are strikingly like those familiarly known as Chinese (Mongolian), and the expression is decidedly gentle. Physically they are weak, and life hardly ever exceeds fifty years. The natives of Jamaica—as a few skulls found from time to time testify—possessed, in common with other West Indian tribes, the peculiarity of tying boards on to the foreheads of their children in such a way that the skulls assumed and permanently retained an extraordinarily flat shape. Peter Martyr, who heard it spoken, said that the language in the Greater Antilles was “soft and not less liquid than the Latin,” and “rich in vowels and pleasant to the ear.” Of words of West Indian origin, those most frequently in use in the English language are avocado (aguacate) pear, barbecue, buccaneer, canoe, Carib and its derivative cannibal, guava, hammock, hurricane, iguana, maize, manatee, pirogue, potato and tobacco.