168 The Aborigines of Brazil. 



The black, brown, or exceedingly rarely dark blue eye of 

 the Brazilian savage displays in its dark glance, the clouded 

 dreamy sunkenness of the race. It is often destroyed by 

 injuries — but gray cataract is not common, and green or black 

 are still rarer. Inflammation of the eye in consequence of ex- 

 treme exposure to light, and to the smoke of their huts, oc- 

 curs in those districts, in which the red man retires into dark- 

 ened hovels to avoid the intolerable swarms of musquitoes, as 

 is the case on the Rio Negro, and on several tributaries of 

 the Solimoes. But with this exception, the noble organ of 

 vision enjoys, in the green glades of the forest, on the airy 

 plains of the table land, away from the injurious stimuli of 

 learning and of European civilization, never directed on the 

 close type of a school book, or bent on a novel while the 

 hands are employed in knitting,* never allowed the use of 

 spectacles, of opera glasses or of microscopes, — a fortunate 

 liberty, which can only improve its strength and sound- 

 ness. What I have oftenest observed among Indians as 

 well as negroes in these countries, is the arcus senilis, a cir- 

 cular thickening of a ring of the cornea round the pupil, and 

 this, not as a consequence of advanced age, but of catarrhal 

 inflammation. f From the use of bad diet, especially of 

 salted fish on long water journies, the Indians are often at- 

 tacked with slight inflammation of the eye, for which they 

 commonly use the freshly expressed juice of the buds of the 

 Ambauba tree (Cecropia) as a wash. The ear suffers oftener 

 than the eye among the autochthones of Brazil. I have seen 

 several men and women quite deaf, or more than half so. 

 In some I observed large scars from severe inflammation 

 of the Parotid, and probably of the internal ear. They had 

 come on at the termination of exanthematous fevers. The 

 Indian takes little care of the delicate organ of hearing; 

 he often has no covering to his head, and seldom wears 



* Knitting, the eternal employment of German women. — 2V. 

 f We doubt much whether, there is ever a connexion between arcus senilis and 

 catarrhal inflammation.— Tr. 



