612 The Andes and the Amazons. 



formity of temperature (the result of a want or violent 

 and i^rolonged changes from variations of winds of the 

 Amazons basin); the usual gentle northeast breezes, not 

 often being varied by the cold southeast winds, which lat- 

 ter only appear, at most, three days at a time, and that 

 but very rarely. And it has occurred to me that this 

 whole Amazons valley, more especially the Maraiion por- 

 tion of it, in its comparative uniform temperature and 

 humidity, resembles somewhat a marine climate as regards 

 its atmosphere, but without the liability of gales at de- 

 pressed temperatures, which may in some measure account 

 for its greater healthfulness when compared with other 

 tropical river- basins. Whether, in years to come, when 

 these tropical forests are thinned by the immigrant, and 

 the stm breathes all its fire on large cleared districts, with 

 the necessary results of violent and sudden changes of 

 wind and rain, and when the plow or the dredging-ma- 

 chine, which makes progress, may not also turn up ma- 

 laria in its delving, " it were curious to consider." Yet, 

 as remarked before, one must,* in estimating comparative 

 health, take into consideration the relative number of in- 

 habitants in the Amazons basin ; their scattered locations ; 

 inaccessibility; paucity of numbers of the white races; 

 and the little really that is known by the traveler in this 

 part of the world of the state of health of the peoples who, 

 hidden away here and there in the wooded recesses, die, 

 and leave no sign by which to tell of tlieir diseases or of 

 the numbers who have perished, or of how the survivors 



* It is a well-known fact in tropical South America that the dwellers of 

 the mountains stand the change to a lowland climate much less healthfully 

 than the foreigner, of whatever nationality. I have been told by an intelli- 

 gent Ecuadorian physician, Dr. E. Suarez, formerly of Quito, that the (ser- 

 rano) mountaineer who goes to the Pacific coast to trade is very liable to 

 die there ; and that it is difficult sometimes to persuade him to undertake ex- 

 peditions either to that lowland country, or to the borders of the river Napo, 

 which is the outlet of Ecuador to the south and east. 



