MARIPA AND ARIPAO 109 



have been waste of time to have gone mto details respect- 

 ing the disease in the form of microbes, and its trans- 

 mission from one being to another, as in the case of 

 malaria, in the shape of plasmodia, so that my ex- 

 planations had to be of a character which they could 

 assimilate. They usually appeared to be very much 

 surprised at the theory, but they almost invariably agreed 

 that the period during which malaria was prevalent coin- 

 cided with the presence of certain kinds of mosquitos. 



A walk of three-quarters of an hour across the llano 

 takes one to Maripa. Nearly all the inhabitants of this 

 place and the neighbouring village of Aripao are pure 

 negroes. The fact is worth mentioning, because the 

 black race does not by any means constitute so large a 

 proportion of the inhabitants of Venezuela as it does in 

 the West Indies and in the Southern States of North 

 America. I was told that these negroes of Maripa and 

 Aripao are the descendants of one of the few batches of 

 slaves introduced into the country before the abolition of 

 slavery. The republics of South America, with the 

 exception of Brazil, do not appear to have given much 

 encouragement to the African slave-trade. It is not 

 that the Spaniards were more humane than the other 

 Europeans who followed in their footsteps, and finally 

 wrested a part of their possessions from them, for they 

 also made use of African slave-labour in their West 

 Indian colonies, but on the mainland they probably 

 obtained all the workers they had need of from the 

 conquered tribes who owned the country before their 

 advent, so that there was no necessity for importing 

 slaves from a foreign country. 



The negroes of Maripa and Aripao possess all the 

 features of the races from the Slave Coast ; they have the 



