FAMILY BESrAIISLAKCES. 
303 
toothache.* This disorder is, however, almost unknown to the 
Indians ; and the whites suffer seldom from it in the Spanish 
colonies, at least in the warm regions, where the tempera- 
ture is so uniform. They are more exposed to it on the 
back of the Cordilleras, at Santa-Fe, and at Popayan. 
The Chaymas, like almost all the native nations I have 
seen, have small, slender hands. Their feet are large, and 
their toes retain an extraordinary mobility. All the Chay- 
mas have a sort of family look ; and this resemblance, 
so often observed by travellers, is the more striking, as 
between the ages of twenty and fifty, difference of years is 
no way denoted by wrinkles of the skin, colour of the hair, 
or decrepitude of the body. On entering a hut, it is often 
difficult among adult persons io distinguish the father from 
the son, and not to confound one generation with another. 
1 attribute this air of family resemblance to two different 
causes, the local situation of the Indian tribes, and their 
inferior degree of intellectual culture. Savage nations are 
subdivided into an infinity of tribes, which, bearing violent 
hatred one to another, form no intermarriages, even when 
their languages spring from the same root, and when only a 
small arm of a river, or a group of hills, separates their habi- 
tations. The less numerous the tribes, the more the inter- 
marriages repeated for ages between the same families tend 
to fix a certain similarity of conformation, an organic type, 
which may be called national. This type is preserved under 
the system of the Missions, each Mission being formed by a 
single horde, and marriages being contracted only between 
the inhabitants of the same hamlet. Those ties of blood 
which unite almost a whole nation, arc indicated in a simple 
* The tribes seen by the Spaniards on the coast of Paria, probably 
observed the practice of stimulating the organs of taste by caustic lime, 
as other races employed tobacco, the chimo, the leaves of the coca, 
or the betel. This practice exists even in our days, but more 
towards the west, among the Guajiros, at the month of the Rio de la 
llacha. These Indians, still savage, carry small shells, calcined and 
powdered, in the husk of a fruit, which serves them as a vessel for various 
purposes, suspended to their girdle. The powder of the Guajiros is an 
article of commerce, as was anciently, according to Gomarn, that of the 
Indians of Faria. The immoderate habit of smoking also makes the teeth 
yellow and blackens them ; but would it be just to conclude from this 
fact, that Europeans smoke because we think yellow teeth handsomer 
than white ? 
