5o8 EXCURSIONS BEYOND EGA 



of the victims, a neighbour of mine, happened to be 

 present during the narrative, and showed her interest in 

 it by laughing at the broken Portuguese in which the girl 

 related the horrible story. 



In the fourth month of my sojourn at St. Paulo I had 

 a serious illness, an attack of the * sizoens ©r ague of 

 the country, which, as it left me with shattered health 

 and damped enthusiasm, led to my abandoning the plan 

 I had formed of proceeding to the Peruvian towns of 

 Pebas and Mogobamba, 250 and 600 miles further west, 

 and so completing the examination of the Natural History 

 of the Amazonian plains up to the foot of the Andes. I 

 made a very large collection at St. Paulo, and employed 

 a collector at Tabatinga and on the banks of the Jauari 

 for several months, so that I acquired a very fair know- 

 ledge altogether of the productions of the country border- 

 ing the Amazons to the end of the Brazilian territory, a 

 distance of 1900 miles from the Atlantic at the mouth of 

 the Para ; but beyond the Peruvian boundary I found now 

 I should be unable to go. My ague seemed to be the 

 culmination of a gradual deterioration of health, which 

 had been going on for several years. I had exposed my- 

 self too much in the sun, working to the utmost of my 

 strength six days a week, and had suffered much, besides, 

 from bad and insufficient food. The ague did not exist 

 at St. Paulo ; but the foul and humid state of the village 

 was, perhaps, sufficient to produce ague in a person much 

 weakened from other causes. The country bordering the 

 shores of the Solimoens is healthy throughout ; some 

 endemic diseases certainly exist, but these are not of a 

 fatal nature, and the epidemics which desolated the Lower 

 Amazons from Para to the Rio Negro, between the years 

 1850 and 1856, had never reached this favoured land. 

 Ague is known only on the banks of those tributary 

 streams which have dark-coloured water. 



I always carried a stock of medicines with me, and a 

 small phial of quinine, which I had bought at Para in 

 185 1, but never yet had use for, now came in very useful. 

 I took for each dose as much as would lie on the tip of a 

 penknife-blade, mixing it with warm camomile tea. The 

 first few days after my first attack I could not stir, and 

 was delirious during the paroxysms of fever ; but the 

 worst being over, I made an effort to rouse myself, knowing 



