JTATTTE OOJTTBIVAirCES. 281 



the Indians often invited us to stretch ourselves as they did 

 on ox-skins, near the church, in tbe middle of the plaza 

 grande., where they had assembled all the cows in the neigh- 

 bourhood. The proximity of cattle gives some repose to 

 mun. The Indians of the Upper Orinoco and the Cassi 

 quiare, seeing that M. Bonpland could not prepare his 

 herbal, owing to the continual torment of the mosquitos, 

 invited him to enter their ovens (hornitos). Thus they call 

 little chambers, without doors or windows, into which they 

 creep horizontally through a very low opening. "When they 

 have drheu away the insects Dy means of a fire of wet 

 brushwood, which emits a great deal of smoke, they close 

 the opening of the oven. The absence of the mosquitos is 

 purchased dearly enough by the excessive heat of the stag- 

 nated air, and the smoke of a torch of copal, which lights 

 the oven during your stay in it. M. Bonpland, with courage 

 and patience well worthy of praise, dried hundreds of plants, 

 shut up in these hornitos of the Indians. 



These precautions of the Indians sufficiently prove that, 

 notwithstanding the different organization of the epidermis, 

 the copper-coloured man, like the white man, suffers from 

 the stings of insects ; but the former S6 -ms to feel less pain, 

 and the sting is not followed by those swellings which, 

 during several weeks, heighten the irritability of the skin, 

 and throw persons of a delicate constitution into that 

 feverish state which always accompanies eruptive maladies. 

 Whites born in equinoctial America, and Europeans who 

 have long sojourned in the Missions, on the borders of 

 forests and great rivers, suffer much more than the Indians, 

 but infinitely less than Europeans newly arrived. It is not, 

 therefore, as some travellers assert, the thickness of the 

 skin that renders the sting more or less painful at the 

 moment when it is received ; nor is it owing to the parti- 

 cular organization of the integuments, that in the Indians 

 the sting is followed by less of swelling and inflammatory 

 symptoms; it is on the nervous irritability of the epidermis 

 that the acuteness and duration of the pain depend. This 

 irritability is augmented by very warm clothing, by the use 

 of alcoholic liquors, by the habit of scratching the wounds, 

 and lastly, (and this physiological observation is the result of 

 my own experience,) that of baths repeated at too short 



