UATrrE COFTItl VANCE8. 
281 
the Indians often invited us to stretch ourselves as they did 
°n ox-skins, near the church, in the middle of the plaza 
f rande, where they had assembled all the cows in the neigh- 
ourhood. The proximity of cattle gives some repose to 
•nan. The Indians of the Upper Orinoco and the Cassi' 
ffinare, seeing that M. Bonpland could not prepare his 
herbal, owing to the continual torment of the mosquitos, 
invited him to enter their ovens (homitos). Thus they call 
httle chambers, without doors or windows, into which they 
creep horizontally through a very low opening. When they 
have driven away the insects by means of a Are of wet 
brushwood, which emits a great deal of smoke, they close 
the opening of the oven. The absence of the mosquitos is 
Purchased dearly enough by the excessive heat of the stag- 
nated air, and the smoke of a torch of copal, which lights 
the oven during vour stay in it. M. Bonpland, with coin-age 
a Ud patience well worthy of praise, dried hundreds of plants, 
shut up in these homitos of the Indians. 
fhese precautions of the Indians sufficiently prove that, 
Notwithstanding the different organization of the epidermis, 
the copper-coloured man, like the white man, suffers from 
the stings of insects; but the former sc-ms to feel less pain, 
‘l t| d the sting is not followed by those swellings which, 
•hiring several weeks, heighten the irritability of the skin, 
an d throw persons of a delicate constitution into that 
perish state which always accompanies eruptive maladies. 
^ bites born in equinoctial America, and Europeans who 
have long sojourned in the Missions, on the borders of 
,°fests and great rivers, suffer much more than the Indians, 
?Nt infinitely less than Europeans newly arrived. It is not, 
b®refore, as some travellers assert, the thickness of the 
that renders the sting more or less painful at the 
foment when it is received ; nor is it owing to the parti- 
Ular organization of the integuments, that in the Indians 
s ,Ci sting is followed by less of swelling and inflammatory 
jTnptoms ; it is on the nervous irritability of the epidermis 
. ut the acuteness and duration of the pain depend. This 
itability is augmented by very warm clothing, by the use 
alcoholic liquors, by the habit of scratching the wounds, 
d lastly, (and this physiological observation is the result of 
y own experience,) that of baths repeated at too short 
