A somewhat similar system prevails to-day among the Lacandons, though the young man demands his wife in person. If her parents agree, the couple live as man and wife in the house of her father for a year on trial. At the end of the year, the couple, their relations and friends, paint themselves and assume their best ornaments; the bride presents her husband with a stool and five cacao grains, and receives from him a skirt and five cacao grains. Their hands are then joined by the cacique, and a feast follows. The Lacandons are monogamous, and divorce, probably owing to the system of trial-marriage, is rare. Among the Quiché also marriage was by purchase, but the bride-price was a serious matter, and apparently often amounted to a considerable sum. We are told that the princes grew rich on the gifts which they received in return for their daughters, but the system brought abuses with it, and quarrels arose which became so frequent and serious that the tribe split up into nine “families” and twenty-four “great houses.” The tendency to matriarchy seen among the Maya is even more evident among the Kakchiquel, since if the couple belonged to different clans (chinamitl), the man regarded all the male members of his wife’s clan as either brothers- or sons-in-law, according to age. This would seem to imply that the man passed into his wife’s clan rather than she into his. Commerce flourished among the later Maya, and there was a good deal of travelling to and fro in the country. The pilgrimages to celebrated shrines along recognized routes have already been mentioned, and also the fact that there was a particular god of travel, Ekchuah. The Yucatec traded salt, textiles and slaves to Uloa and Tabasco, in exchange for cacao and stone money; red shells were imported, and also copper from New Spain. Diaz mentions that the Spaniards found, in a village in Chiapas, a number of prisoners secured by wooden collars who had been captured on the road, and he states that some of these were travellers from Tehuantepec and Soconusco. On the border of Yucatan and in the hilly region of Alta Vera Paz there were well-defined trade-routes, and Cortés after crossing the Usumacinta came to a district, which he calls Acalan, where the inhabitants maintained trade-intercourse, mainly by boat, with Tabasco, and had trade-outposts on the Golfo Dulce and the Honduras border. In the earliest times there must have been much extended intercourse among the tribes, at any rate pendants of sea-shells constitute one of the most frequent ornaments seen on the monuments, and the Quiché seem to have sent an expedition on a long journey to obtain royal _insignia_, as mentioned above. Much of the trade was performed by direct exchange, but there were certain forms of currency. Cacao formed the “small change,” and Herrera states that 200 of the nuts went to a _real_. Red shells and stone counters are also mentioned as money, as well as copper bells, the