194 • Wild Beasts 



him with romances, legends, and folk-lore tales. It was a 

 subject for comment among the ^arly Spanish writers that 

 so few of these animals were killed by Indians. In his 

 "Brief Narrative of the Most Remarkable Things that 

 Samuel Champlain observed in the Western Indies," 

 we find a mention of some jaguar skins that had been 

 bartered by natives, referred to as rarities. Now, as 

 many or more come annually from Buenos Ayres alone 

 as were once procured in the same time throughout the 

 Amazon valleys. Notices of jaguars being taken in traps 

 are occasionally found in books, but detailed descriptions 

 of the process of catching them the author has not met 

 with. Some of the tribes possess efficient weapons of 

 their kind — bows, strong enough, as Cieza de Leon asserts, 

 "to send an arrow through a horse, or the knight who 

 rides it." These Indians are in the habit likewise of poison- 

 ing their arrow-heads. Cieza gives an account of how, 

 after much trouble and persuasion, he induced the abo- 

 rigines at Carthagena and Santa Martha to show him their 

 mode of preparing poison. His relation, however, is not 

 very instructive. Humboldt and Bonpland (" Voyage, etc., 

 Relation Historique") give "curare" as the active prin- 

 ciple of those mixtures made by Amazonian tribes. These 

 poisons contain, both in South -America and all over the 

 world where they are used, matters which are more or less 

 inert, and have been introduced upon purely magical 

 principles. E. F. im Thurn found the effective constit- 

 uent used in Guiana to be " Strychnos-Urari, Yakki, or 

 Arimaru — i.e., S. toxifera, S. Schomburgkii, S. cogens'' 

 Both he and Sir R. Schomburgh speak of other ingredients 



