DiKT-EATING. 593 



when it does prevail, it is a devouring passion, which is 

 truly remarkable. Even strangers, English or the white 

 Peruvians, who have married with the mestizos, and have 

 had children by them, find its presence among their little 

 ones the plague of their life ; and the accounts one hears 

 about the tyranny of this habit of dirt-eating on the vic- 

 tims of it would seem almost fabulous, were there not evi- 

 dences all around one to give sanction to them. Children 

 commence the habit from the time they are four years 

 old, or less, and freqently die from the results in two or 

 three years. In other cases, they grow to manhood or 

 womanhood with the " appetite growing by what it feeds 

 on ;" and I have seen here myself, in the case of a mestizo 

 soldier, who was dying from the dysentery which gener- 

 ally, sooner or later, supervenes on this habit, the poor 

 creature, half an hour before his death, detected with a 

 lump of clay stuffed in his sunken cheeks, which he had 

 dragged from the wall near where he was almost breath- 

 ing his last. Oflicers here who have the Indian or half- 

 breed children as servants in their employ sometimes have 

 to use wire masks to keep them from putting the clay to 

 their mouths ; and women, as they lie in bed sleepless and 

 restless, will pull out pieces of mud from the adjoining 

 walls of their room to gratify their strange appetite, or 

 will soothe a squalling brat by tempting it with a lamp of 

 the same material. If persisted in, the effects are surely 

 fatal, at varying terms of years ; some living tolerably to 

 middle age, and then dying with dysentery, or from that 

 disease at an earlier period. In the children dropsy is 

 usually the most prominent apparent cause of decline and 

 death. 



Yarious have been the causes assigned for this unnatu- 

 ral appetite, and the obscure intervention of anaemia and 



decline. I have not as yet had an opportunity of detect- 

 2P 



