104 



Bonpland, with courage and patience well 

 worthy of praise, dried hundreds of plants, shut 

 up in these hornitos of the Indians. 



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 sting of insects, like the white 

 man; but we here repeat, that the former seems 

 to feel less plain, 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 



