206 
PLAGUE 01’ THE MOSQUITOS. 
no swelling in either; and scarcely ever produces those 
little pustules which occasion such smarting and itching 
to Europeans recently arrived. But the native and the 
White suffer equally from the sting, till the insect has with- 
drawn its sucker from the skin. After a thousand useless 
essays, M. Bonpland and myself tried the expedient of 
rubbing our hands and arms with the fat of the crocodile, 
and the oil of turtle-eggs, but we never felt the least 
relief, and were stung as before. I know that the Lap- 
landers boast of oil and fat as the most useful preservatives ; 
but the insects of Scandinavia are not of the same species 
as those of the Orinoco. The smoke of tobacco drives 
away our gnats, while it is employed in vain against the 
eancudos. If the application of fat and astringent* sub- 
stances preserved the inhabitants of these countries from 
the torment of insects, as Father Gumilla alleges, why has 
not the custom of painting the skin become general on these 
shores ? Why do so many naked natives paint only the 
face, though living in the neighbourhood of those who 
paint the whole body?t 
We are struck with the observation, that the Indians of 
the Orinoco, like the natives of North America, prefer tho 
substances that yield a red colour to every other. Is this 
predilection founded on the facility with which the savage 
procures ochreous earths, or the colouring fecula of anato 
and of chica ? I doubt this much. Indigo grows wild in a 
great part of equinoctial America. This plant, like so many 
other leguminous plants, would have furnished the natives 
abundantly with pigments to colour themselves blue like the 
ancient Britons.J Tet we see no American tribe painted 
with indigo. It appears to me probable, as I have already 
hinted above, that the preference given by tho Americans 
to the red colour is generally founded on the tendency 
which nations feel to attribute the idea of beauty to what- 
ever characterises their national physiognomy. Men whose 
skin is naturally of a brownish red, love a red colour. If 
* The pulp of the anato. and even the chica, are astringent and 
slightly purgative. 
+ The Caribs, the Salives, the Tamanacs, and the Maypures. 
$ The half-clad nations of the temperate zone often paint their skin of 
the same colour as that with which their clothes are dyed. 
