It is believed that the Céres Indians have discovered a method of poisoning their arrows, and that they do it in this way: They kill a cow and take from it its liver. They then collect a number of rattlesnakes, scorpions, centipedes, and tarantulas, which they confine in a hole with the liver. The next process is to beat them with sticks in order to enrage them, and being thus infuriated, they fasten their fangs and exhaust their venom upon each other and upon the liver. When the whole mass is in a high state of corruption the old women take the arrows and pass their points through it. They are then allowed to dry in the shade, and it is said that a wound inflicted by them will prove fatal. Others again say that the poison is obtained from the juice of the yerba de la flécha (arrow wort).[146] [146] Ibid., pp. 298, 299. He purchased some of the arrows, which were stone-tipped, and had “certainly had an unguent applied to them”. He was impressed by indications of family affection, and noted the custom of having two wives. Concerning tribal relations he says: These people have been always considered extremely ferocious, and there is little doubt, from their brave and warlike character, that they may formerly have devastated a great part of the country; but in modern days their feuds are nearly confined to a neighboring tribe of the same name as themselves (Céres), who speak the same language and in all probability originally descended from the same stock. They are said to be inferior to those of this island both in courage and stature, and they are never suffered to cross the channel. From what I was told * * * the Tiburow Céres have lately returned from a sanguinary war with the Tépoca Céres, in which the former were victorious.[147] [147] Ibid., pp. 299, 300. Later in his itinerary Hardy noted a typical Yaqui revolution, with a characteristic effort to secure the cooperation of the Seri.[148] He defined the Seri habitat as “the island of Tiburow, the coast of Tépoca, and the pueblo of Los Céres, near Pitic”;[149] and he estimated the population at “3,000 or 4,000 at the very utmost”,[150] and quoted the estimate of Don José Maria Retio, viz., that the Seri population of Tiburon was 1,000 to 1,500.[151] [148] Ibid., p. 395 et seq. [149] Ibid., p. 437. [150] Ibid., p. 438. [151] Ibid., pp. 235, 540. Like most of those visitors to the Seri who have returned to tell their tale, Hardy “praised the bridge that carried him over” and gave the tribe passable character—worse, of course, than that of any other, yet hardly so bad as painted at Pitic. A noteworthy traveler in western America during 1840-1842 was M. Duflot de Mofras, an attache of the French legation in Mexico. He traversed the Californias and entered Sonora, and while he failed to see Seriland, he made a note on the tribe, valuable as a current estimate of the population: