When America was discovered, the four great families were spread in scattering and widely differing tribes over the whole of Brazil and the adjacent countries. Their state of culture varied from that of the most squalid tribes of Botacudos, who had not even reached the Stone Age, lived in brush shelters, slept in the ashes of their fires, practised promiscuous marriage, and had no idea of religion except a fear of malignant spirits; up to Arawaks, who were cleanly, had a well-defined tribal organisation, and built marvellous canoes, or Tupis, who cultivated the soil, built fair houses, used rude machinery for making mandioc flour, spun cotton, wove cloth, and were good potters. But the civilisation of the best of them was stationary. No Brazilian tribe ever got beyond the condition where the struggle to obtain food was its sole preoccupation. No civilisation like that of Mexico, Peru, or Yucatan ever existed. Disaggregation, failure, and obliteration were the rule. Organically unfitted to cope with their surroundings they never devised a method of getting a good and permanent food-supply. Defective nutrition sapped their powers to resist strains. Their muscular appearance was not accompanied by corresponding endurance. Their European taskmasters could never understand why they died from the effects of exertion to which a white man would easily have been equal. The vast majority had no regular agriculture and lived on the spontaneous products of the forests and the streams. Land game is not abundant in the tropics, and they had developed only few good food plants. What they did procure was spoiled by bad preparation. Such a people had no chance of successfully resisting the Portuguese invaders, and their only hope of survival was in contact and admixture with the more vigorous white and black races. [Illustration: A TUPI VILLAGE.] The Tupi-Guaranies occupied one-fourth of Brazil, all of Paraguay and Uruguay, and much of Bolivia and the Argentine, and it is probable that the original seats of this family were in the central table-lands or in Paraguay. All Tupi Indians spoke dialects of one language, which the Jesuit missionaries soon reduced to grammatical and literary form, and which became a _lingua franca_ that was understood from the Plate to the Amazon. Back of the coast Tupis were the Botacudos, the most degraded and intractable of Brazilian savages, remnants of whom still survive in their original seats in Espirito Santo, Minas, and Sao Paulo. The Caribs, with whom students of the history of the Caribbean Sea are familiar, originated in the plains of Goyaz and Matto Grosso and emigrated as far north as the Antilles. The Arawaks were most numerous in Guiana and on the Lower Amazon, but were also spread over central Brazil.