104 



Bonpland, with courage and patience well 

 worthy of praise, dried hundreds of plants, shut 

 up in these hornitos of the 1 ndians. 



The care which the Indians take to be less 

 incommoded by the insects sufficiently proves, 

 that,, notwithstanding the different organization 

 of the dermoid system, the copper-coloured man 

 is sensible to the stings of insects, like the white 

 man ; but we here repeat, that the former seems 

 to feel less pain, and the sting is not followed by 

 those swellings, that succeed without interrup- 

 tion during several weeks, heighten the irrita- 

 bility of the skin, and throw persons of a delicate 

 constitution into that feverish state, which al- 

 ways accompanies eruptive maladies. The whites 

 born in equinoctial America, the Europeans who 

 have long sojourned in the missions, on the bor- 

 ders of forests and great rivers, suffer much 

 more than the Indians, but infinitely less than 

 Europeans recently arrived. It is not there- 

 fore, as some travellers assert, the thickness 

 of the skin, that renders the sting more or 

 less painful at the moment when it is received ; 

 it is not on account of the particular organi- 

 zation of the integuments, that the Indians feel 

 the sting less followed by swelling and inflam- 

 matory symptoms ; it is on the nervous irritabi- 

 lity of the dermoid system, that the acuteness 

 and duration of the pain depend. This irritabi- 

 lity is augmented by very warm clothing, by the 



