18 On the Aborigines of Brazil. 



vital powers, but in the inconsiderate way in which the 

 elders join in the chase, and in the wars, thereby subjecting 

 themselves to sudden attacks of violent illness, which from 

 the want of all proper medical aid, most frequently prove 

 fatal. Women, however, are often to be seen of great age, 

 between the years of 70 and 90. These aged creatures 

 attain in the filth and ashes of their hearths, among which 

 they always live, a state of decrepitude, which one cannot 

 behold without sorrow and disgust. 



Development of the Senses, 

 The senses of the Brazilian Indian are certainly sharp, live- 

 ly, and of long endurance : but they are so developed only 

 in certain matters, and in varied degrees. They are almost 

 solely confined to the requirements of a life of poverty. They 

 do not go beyond this, and they do not embrace abstract ideas : 

 they are occupied only with the life of the next moment, are 

 without past or future, and without the subtleties and the re- 

 finements of love, or the foresight of prudence. The savage 

 smells with distended nostrils, whether a friend or an ene- 

 my has entered the forest, he discovers a long way off among 

 the thickets the animal that he is in chase of, and can distin- 

 guish man or beast on the very horizon of a boundless plain ; 

 his vision of minute objects when near, is also very acute;* 

 he hears, lying on the ground, with his ear pressed to it, 

 the lightest footstep of the approaching foe ; he wanders 

 with instinctive certainty in the darkest night through the 

 forest, and with his dark eyes, makes discoveries even in the 

 thickest gloom, in which a European can see nothing; and 

 yet the Indian is half-deaf, half-blind, half without feeling 

 or smell. That higher degree of intelligence, the concen- 

 trated not the extended, which sports and plays with 



* Dobrizhofer tells of an Abipora, who, while sitting on horseback observed a 

 flea on the coat of a priest riding along side, dismounted, caught the flea and pre- 

 sented it with comic gravity to its proprietor. 





