548 SECOND VOYAGE FOR THE DISCOVERY 



with their oracles, are looked upon with confidence, and their mandates, 

 however absurd, superstitiously submitted to. These arc constituted of 

 unnieaniui,' ceremonies and prohibitions generally aftecting the diet, both in 

 kind and mode, but never in quantity. Seal's flesh is Corbidden, for instance, 

 in one disease, that of the walrus in the other ; the heart is denied to some 

 and the liver to others. A poor woman, on discovering that the meat she 

 had in her mouth Avas a piece of fried heart instead of the liver, ai)i)eared 

 horror-struck ; and a man was in equal tribulation at having eaten, by mis- 

 take, a piece of meat cooked in his wife's kettle. 



" This charlatanerie, although we may ridicule the imposition, is not, how- 

 ever, with them, as it is with us, a positive evil. In the toial absence of the 

 medical art, it proves generally innoxious ; while in many instances it must 

 be a source of real benefit and comfort, by buoying up the sick spirit with 

 confident hopes of recovery, and eventually enabling the vital powers to rise 

 superior to the malady, when, without such support, the suft'erer might have 

 sunk under its weight. It was attempted to ascertain whether climate effected 

 any difference in animal heat between them and ourselves, by frequently 

 marking the temperature of the mouth ; but the experiments were neces- 

 sarily made, as occasion offered, under such various states of vascular excite- 

 ment, as to afford nothing conclusive. As it was, their temperature varied 

 from 97° to 102°, coinciding pretty nearly with our own under similar cir- 

 cumstances. The pulse offered nothing singular. 



" I may here remark that there is in )uany individuals a peculiarity about 

 the eye amounting, in some instances, to deformity, which I have not noticed 

 elsewhere. It consists in the inner corner of the eye being entirely covered 

 by a duplication of the adjacent loose skin of the eye-lids and nose. This 

 fold is lightly stretched over the edges of the eye-lids, and forms as it were 

 a third palpebra of a crescentic shape. The aperture is in consequence ren- 

 dered somewhat pyriform, the inner curvature being very obtuse, and in 

 some individuals distorted by an angle formed where the Ibid crosses the 

 border of the lower palpebra. This singularity depends upon the variable 

 form of the orbit during immature age, and is very renuirkable in childhood, 

 less so towards adult age, and then, it would seem, frequently disappearing 

 altogether ; for the proportion in which it exists among grown-up persons 

 bears but a small comparison with that observed among the young. 



" Person-al deformity from mal-conformation is uncommon ; the only 

 instance I remember being that of a young woman, whose utterance was 



