WILD HOGS— MONKEYS MOSQUITOES. 213 



The cattle introduced by the Jesuits had entirely 

 disappeared ; but the Indians rear the common pig 

 and another kind peculiar to America, and known in 

 Europe by the name of pecari. A third species of 

 hog, the apida, which is of a dark-brown colour, 

 wanders in large herds composed of several hun- 

 dreds. M. Bonpland, when upon a botanical excur- 

 sion, saw a drove of these animals pass near him. 

 It marched in a close body ; the males before, and 

 each sow accompanied by her young. The natives 

 kill them with small lances tied to cords. At the 

 mission they saw a monkey of a new species, which 

 had been brought up in captivity, and which every 

 day seized a pig in the court-yard, and remained upon 

 it from morning to night, in all its wanderings in the 

 savannas. Here, for the first time, they heard of 

 the hairy man of the woods, a large animal of the 

 ape kind, which, according to report, carries off 

 women, builds huts, and sometimes eats human 

 flesh. In all his travels in America, Humboldt found 

 no traces of a large anthropomorphous monkey, al- 

 though in several places, very distant from each 

 other, he heard similar accounts of it. 



Flies of various kinds unceasingly tormented the 

 travellers ; mosquitoes and simulia by day, and zan- 

 cudoes by night. The missionary, observing that 

 the insects were more abundant in the lowest stra- 

 tum of the atmosphere, had constructed near the 

 church a small apartment supported upon palm- 

 trunks, to which they retired in the evening to dry 

 their plants and write their journals.* At Maypures 



* A similar expedient was tried by a British officer who had joined the 

 insurgents under Bolivar, in 1818. " These insects" (the mosquitoes), 

 says he, " do not rise high in the air, but are generated and remain near 

 the wet bank of the river. I found a tree in the neighbourhood, which I 

 ascended nearly to its top with a cord. This I attached firmly to the 

 branches, and then fixed it round me, so that I could not fall, but sit with 

 safety, although not with much comfort. It was, however, with me 

 here as with many in various situations in life— I could estimate the nature 

 and extent of my pleasures and my difficulties merely by comparison ; 

 and, certainly, although the being tied to the top of a tree as a sleeping- 



