1851.] 
THE MATAMATA. 
329 
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hot broths, or caxaga and peppers, being here considered 
the appropriate medicines. With the help of a few su- 
dorifics and purgatives, and cooling drinks and baths, 
with quinine between the fits, he soon got better, — much 
to his astonishment, as he was almost afraid to submit 
himself to the treatment I recommended. 
I spent a whole week here, for the fishermen were 
unsuccessful, and for five days no Peixe boi appeared. 
I however had plenty to do, as I skinned a small turtle 
and a ‘‘matamata’’ {Clielys Matamato), that Senhor Joao 
gave me. This is an extraordinary river-tortoise, with a 
deeply-keeled and tubercled shell, and a huge flat broad 
head and neck, garnished with curious lobed fleshy ap- 
pendages ; the nostrils are prolonged into a tube, — giving 
the animal altogether a most singular appearance. Some 
of our Indians went every day to fish, and I several 
times sent the net, and thus procured many new species 
to figure and describe, which kept me pretty constantly 
at work, the intervals being filled up by visits to my 
patient, eating water-melons, and drinking coffee. This 
is a fine locality for fish, and as far as they are concerned 
I should have liked to stay a month or two, as there 
were many curious and interesting species to be found 
here, which I had not yet obtained. 
At length one morning the Peixi boi we had been so 
long expecting, arrived. It had been caught the night 
before, with a net, in a lake at some distance. It was a 
nearly full-grown male, seven feet long and five in cir- 
cumference. By the help of a long pole and cords four 
Indians carried it to a shed, where it was laid on a bed 
of palm-leaves, and two or three men set to work skin- 
