Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.2 — Chapter 2.24, Part 7

We stayed at the mission of Atures only during the time necessary for passing the canoe through the Great Cataract.

The bottom of our frail bark had become so thin that it required great care to prevent it from splitting.

We took leave of the missionary, Bernardo Zea, who remained at Atures, after having accompanied us during two months, and shared all our sufferings.

This poor monk still continued to have fits of tertian ague; they had become to him an habitual evil, to which he paid little attention.

Other fevers of a more fatal kind prevailed at Atures on our second visit.

The greater part of the Indians could not leave their hammocks, and we were obliged to send in search of cassava-bread, the most indispensable food of the country, to the independent but neighbouring tribe of the Piraoas.

We had hitherto escaped these malignant fevers, which I believe to be always contagious.

We ventured to pass in our canoe through the latter half of the Raudal of Atures.

We landed here and there, to climb upon the rocks, which like narrow dikes joined the islands to one another.

Sometimes the waters force their way over the dikes, sometimes they fall within them with a hollow noise.

A considerable portion of the Orinoco was dry, because the river had found an issue by subterraneous caverns.

In these solitary haunts the rock-manakin with gilded plumage (Pipra rupicola), one of the most beautiful birds of the tropics, builds its nest.

The Raudalito of Carucari is caused by an accumulation of enormous blocks of granite, several of which are spheroids of five or six feet in diameter, and they are piled together in such a manner, as to form spacious caverns.

We entered one of these caverns to gather the confervas that were spread over the clefts and humid sides of the rock.

This spot displayed one of the most extraordinary scenes of nature that we had contemplated on the banks of the Orinoco.

The river rolled its waters turbulently over our heads.

It seemed like the sea dashing against reefs of rocks; but at the entrance of the cavern we could remain dry beneath a large sheet of water that precipitated itself in an arch from above the barrier.

In other cavities, deeper, but less spacious, the rock was pierced by the effect of successive filtrations.

We saw columns of water, eight or nine inches broad, descending from the top of the vault, and finding an issue by clefts, that seemed to communicate at great distances with each other.

The cascades of Europe, forming only one fall, or several falls close to each other, can never produce such variety in the shifting landscape.

This variety is peculiar to rapids, to a succession of small cataracts several miles in length, to rivers that force their way across rocky dikes and accumulated blocks of granite.

We had the opportunity of viewing this extraordinary sight longer than we wished.

Our boat was to coast the eastern bank of a narrow island, and to take us in again after a long circuit.

We passed an hour and a half in vain expectation of it.

Night approached, and with it a tremendous storm.

It rained with violence.

We began to fear that our frail bark had been wrecked against the rocks, and that the Indians, conformably to their habitual indifference for the evils of others, had returned tranquilly to the mission.

There were only three of us: we were completely wet, and uneasy respecting the fate of our boat: it appeared far from agreeable to pass, without sleep, a long night of the torrid zone amid the noise of the Raudales.

M.

Bonpland proposed to leave me in the island with Don Nicolas Soto, and to swim across the branches of the river that are separated by the granitic dikes.

He hoped to reach the forest, and seek assistance at Atures from Father Zea.

We dissuaded him with difficulty from undertaking this hazardous enterprise.

He knew little of the labyrinth of small channels, into which the Orinoco is divided.

Most of them have strong whirlpools, and what passed before our eyes while we were deliberating on our situation, proved sufficiently that the natives had deceived us respecting the absence of crocodiles in the cataracts.

The little monkeys which we had carried along with us for months were deposited on the point of our island.

Wet by the rains and sensible of the least lowering of the temperature, these delicate animals sent forth plaintive cries, and attracted to the spot two crocodiles, the size and leaden colour of which denoted their great age.

Their unexpected appearance made us reflect on the danger we had incurred by bathing, at our first passing by the mission of Atures, in the middle of the Raudal.

After long waiting, the Indians at length arrived at the close of day.

The natural coffer-dam by which they had endeavoured to descend in order to make the circuit of the island, had become impassable owing to the shallowness of the water.

The pilot sought long for a more accessible passage in this labyrinth of rocks and islands.

Happily our canoe was not damaged and in less than half an hour our instruments, provision, and animals, were embarked.

We pursued our course during a part of the night, to pitch our tent again in the island of Panumana.

We recognized with pleasure the spots where we had botanized when going up the Orinoco.

We examined once more on the beach of Guachaco that small formation of sandstone, which reposes directly on granite.

Its position is the same as that of the sandstone which Burckhardt observed at the entrance of Nubia, superimposed on the granite of Syene.

We passed, without visiting it, the new mission of San Borga, where (as we learned with regret a few days after) the little colony of Guahibos had fled al monte, from the chimerical fear that we should carry them off; to sell them as poitos, or slaves.

After having passed the rapids of Tabaje, and the Raudal of Cariven, near the mouth of the great Rio Meta, we arrived without accident at Carichana.

The missionary received us with that kind hospitality which he extended to us on our first passage.

The sky was unfavourable for astronomical observations; we had obtained some new ones in the two Great Cataracts; but thence, as far as the mouth of the Apure, we were obliged to renounce the attempt.

M.

Bonpland had the satisfaction at Carichana of dissecting a manatee more than nine feet long.

It was a female, and the flesh appeared to us not unsavoury.

I have spoken in another place of the manner of catching this herbivorous cetacea.

The Piraoas, some families of whom inhabit the mission of Carichana, detest this animal to such a degree, that they hid themselves, to avoid being obliged to touch it, whilst it was being conveyed to our hut.

They said that the people of their tribe die infallibly when they eat of it.

This prejudice is the more singular, as the neighbours of the Piraoas, the Guamos and the Ottomacs, are very fond of the flesh of the manatee.

The flesh of the crocodile is also an object of horror to some tribes, and of predilection to others.

The island of Cuba furnishes a fact little known in the history of the manatee.

South of the port of Xagua, several miles from the coast, there are springs of fresh water in the middle of the sea.

They are supposed to be owing to a hydrostatic pressure existing in subterraneous channels, communicating with the lofty mountains of Trinidad.

Small vessels sometimes take in water there; and, what is well worthy of observation, large manatees remain habitually in those spots.

I have already called the attention of naturalists to the crocodiles which advance from the mouth of rivers far into the sea.

Analogous circumstances may have caused, in the ancient catastrophes of our planet, that singular mixture of pelagian and fluviatile bones and petrifactions, which is observed in some rocks of recent formation.

Our stay at Carichana was very useful in recruiting our strength after our fatigues.

M.

Bonpland bore with him the germs of a cruel malady;

he needed repose; but as the delta of the tributary streams included between the Horeda and Paruasi is covered with a rich vegetation, he made long herbalizations, and was wet through several times in a day.

We found, fortunately, in the house of the missionary, the most attentive care; we were supplied with bread made of maize flour, and even with milk.

The cows yield milk plentifully enough in the lower regions of the torrid zone, wherever good pasturage is found.

I call attention to this fact, because local circumstances have spread through the Indian Archipelago the prejudice of considering hot climates as repugnant to the secretion of milk.

We may conceive the indifference of the inhabitants of the New World for a milk diet, the country having been originally destitute of animals capable of furnishing it*; (* The reindeer are not domesticated in Greenland as they are in Lapland; and the Esquimaux care little for their milk.

The bisons taken very young accustom themselves, on the west of the Alleghenies, to graze with herds of European cows.

The females in some districts of India yield a little milk, but the natives have never thought of milking them.

What is the origin of that fabulous story related by Gomara (chapter 43 page 36) according to which the first Spanish navigators saw, on the coast of South Carolina, stags led to the savannahs by herdsmen?

The female bisons, according to Mr. Buchanan and the philosophical historian of the Indian Archipelago, Mr. Crawford, yield more milk than common cows.

) but how can we avoid being astonished at this indifference in the immense Chinese population, living in great part beyond the tropics, and in the same latitude with the nomad and pastoral tribes of central Asia?

If the Chinese have ever been a pastoral people, how have they lost the tastes and habits so intimately connected with that state, which precedes agricultural institutions?

These questions are interesting with respect both to the history of the nations of oriental Asia, and to the ancient communications that are supposed to have existed between that part of the world and the north of Mexico.

We went down the Orinoco in two days, from Carichana to the mission of Uruana, after having again passed the celebrated strait of Baraguan.

We stopped several times to determine the velocity of the river, and its temperature at the surface, which was 27. 4 degrees.

The velocity was found to be two feet in a second (sixty-two toises in 3 minutes 6 seconds) in places where the bed of the Orinoco was more than twelve thousand feet broad, and from ten to twelve fathoms deep.

The slope of the river is in fact extremely gentle from the Great Cataracts to Angostura; and, if a barometric measurement were wanting, the difference of height might be determined by approximation, by measuring from time to time the velocity of the stream, and the extent of the section in breadth and depth.

We had some observations of the stars at Uruana.

I found the latitude of the mission to be 7 degrees 8 minutes; but the results from different stars left a doubt of more than 1 minute.

The stratum of mosquitos, which hovered over the ground, was so thick that I could not succeed in rectifying properly the artificial horizon.

I tormented myself in vain; and regretted that I was not provided with a mercurial horizon.

On the 7th of June, good absolute altitudes of the sun gave me 69 degrees 40 minutes for the longitude.

We had advanced from Esmeralda 1 degree 17 minutes toward the west, and this chronometric determination merits entire confidence on account of the double observations, made in going and returning, at the Great Cataracts, and at the confluence of the Atabapo and of the Apure.

The situation of the mission of Uruana is extremely picturesque.

The little Indian village stands at the foot of a lofty granitic mountain.

Rocks everywhere appear in the form of pillars above the forest, rising higher than the tops of the tallest trees.

The aspect of the Orinoco is nowhere more majestic than when viewed from the hut of the missionary, Fray Ramon Bueno.

It is more than two thousand six hundred toises broad, and it runs without any winding, like a vast canal, straight toward the east.

Two long and narrow islands (Isla de Uruana and Isla vieja de la Manteca) contribute to give extent to the bed of the river; the two banks are parallel, and we cannot call it divided into different branches.

The mission is inhabited by the Ottomacs, a tribe in the rudest state, and presenting one of the most extraordinary physiological phenomena.

They eat earth; that is, they swallow every day, during several months, very considerable quantities, to appease hunger, and this practice does not appear to have any injurious effect on their health.

Though we could stay only one day at Uruana, this short space of time sufficed to make us acquainted with the preparation of the poya, or balls of earth.

I also found some traces of this vitiated appetite among the Guamos; and between the confluence of the Meta and the Apure, where everybody speaks of dirt-eating as of a thing anciently known.

I shall here confine myself to an account of what we ourselves saw or heard from the missionary, who had been doomed to live for twelve years among the savage and turbulent tribe of the Ottomacs.

The inhabitants of Uruana belong to those nations of the savannahs called wandering Indians (Indios andantes) who, more difficult to civilize than the nations of the forest (Indios del monte), have a decided aversion to cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively by hunting and fishing.

They are men of very robust constitution; but ill-looking, savage, vindictive, and passionately fond of fermented liquors.

They are omnivorous animals in the highest degree; and therefore the other Indians, who consider them as barbarians, have a common saying, nothing is so loathsome but that an Ottomac will eat it.

While the waters of the Orinoco and its tributary streams are low, the Ottomacs subsist on fish and turtles.

The former they kill with surprising dexterity, by shooting them with an arrow when they appear at the surface of the water.

When the rivers swell fishing almost entirely ceases.

* (* In South America, as in Egypt and Nubia, the swelling of the rivers, which occurs periodically in every part of the torrid zone, is erroneously attributed to the melting of the snows.

) It is then very difficult to procure fish, which often fails the poor missionaries, on fast-days as well as flesh-days, though all the young Indians are under the obligation of fishing for the convent.

During the period of these inundations, which last two or three months, the Ottomacs swallow a prodigious quantity of earth.

We found heaps of earth-balls in their huts, piled up in pyramids three or four feet high.

These balls were five or six inches in diameter.

The earth which the Ottomacs eat is a very fine and unctuous clay of a yellowish grey colour; and, when being slightly baked at the fire, the hardened crust has a tint inclining to red, owing to the oxide of iron which is mingled with it.

We brought away some of this earth, which we took from the winter-provision of the Indians; and it is a mistake to suppose that it is steatitic, and that it contains magnesia.

Vauquelin did not discover any traces of that substance in it but he found that it contained more silex than alumina, and three or four per cent of lime.

The Ottomacs do not eat every kind of clay indifferently; they choose the alluvial beds or strata, which contain the most unctuous earth, and the smoothest to the touch.

I inquired of the missionary whether the moistened clay were made to undergo that peculiar decomposition which is indicated by a disengagement of carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen, and which is designated in every language by the term of putrefaction; but he assured us that the natives neither cause the clay to rot, nor do they mingle it with flour of maize, oil of turtle's eggs, or fat of the crocodile.

We ourselves examined, both at the Orinoco and after our return to Paris, the balls of earth which we brought away with us, and found no trace of the mixture of any organic substance, whether oily or farinaceous.

The savage regards every thing as nourishing that appeases hunger: when, therefore, you inquire of an Ottomac on what he subsists during the two months when the river is at its highest flood he shows you his balls of clayey earth.

This he calls his principal food at the period when he can seldom procure a lizard, a root of fern, or a dead fish swimming at the surface of the water.

If necessity force the Indians to eat earth during two months (and from three quarters to five quarters of a pound in twenty-four hours), he eats it from choice during the rest of the year.

Every day in the season of drought, when fishing is most abundant, he scrapes his balls of poya, and mingles a little clay with his other aliment.

It is most surprising that the Ottomacs do not become lean by swallowing such quantities of earth: they are, on the contrary, extremely robust.

The missionary Fray Ramon Bueno asserts that he never remarked any alteration in the health of the natives at the period of the great risings of the Orinoco.

The Ottomacs during some months eat daily three-quarters of a pound of clay slightly hardened by fire, but which they moisten before swallowing it.

It has not been possible to verify hitherto with precision how much nutritious vegetable or animal matter they take in a week at the same time; but they attribute the sensation of satiety which they feel to the clay, and not to the wretched aliments which they take with it occasionally.

No physiological phenomenon being entirely insulated, it may be interesting to examine several analogous phenomena, which I have been able to collect.

I observed everywhere within the torrid zone, in a great number of individuals, children, women, and sometimes even full-grown men, an inordinate and almost irresistible desire of swallowing earth; not an alkaline or calcareous earth to neutralize (as it is said) acid juices, but a fat clay, unctuous, and exhaling a strong smell.

It is often found necessary to tie the children's hands or to confine them to prevent them eating earth when the rain ceases to fall.

At the village of Banco, on the bank of the river Magdalena, I saw the Indian women who make pottery continually swallowing great pieces of clay.

These women were not in a state of pregnancy; and they affirmed that earth is an aliment which they do not find hurtful.

In other American tribes, people soon fall sick, and waste away, when they yield too much to this mania of eating earth.

We found at the mission of San Borja an Indian child of the Guahiba nation, who was as thin as a skeleton.

The mother informed us that the little girl was reduced to this lamentable state of atrophy in consequence of a disordered appetite, she having refused during four months to take almost any other food than clay.

Yet San Borja is only twenty-five leagues distant from the mission of Uruana, inhabited by that tribe of the Ottomacs, who, from the effect no doubt of a habit progressively acquired, swallow the poya without experiencing any pernicious effects.

Father Gumilla asserts that the Ottomacs take as an aperient, oil, or rather the melted fat of the crocodile, when they feel any gastric obstructions; but the missionary whom we found among them was little disposed to confirm this assertion.

It may be asked, why the mania of eating earth is much more rare in the frigid and temperate than in the torrid zones; and why in Europe it is found only among women in a state of pregnancy, and sickly children.

This difference between hot and temperate climates arises perhaps only from the inert state of the functions of the stomach caused by strong cutaneous perspiration.

It has been supposed to be observed that the inordinate taste for eating earth augments among the African slaves, and becomes more pernicious when they are restricted to a regimen purely vegetable and deprived of spirituous liquors.

The negroes on the coast of Guinea delight in eating a yellowish earth, which they call caouac.

The slaves who are taken to America endeavour to indulge in this habit; but it proves detrimental to their health.

They say that the earth of the West Indies is not so easy of digestion as that of their country.

Thibaut de Chanvalon, in his Voyage to Martinico, expresses himself very judiciously on this pathological phenomenon.

"Another cause," he says, "of this pain in the stomach is that several of the negroes, who come from the coast of Guinea, eat earth; not from a depraved taste, or in consequence of disease, but from a habit contracted at home in Africa, where they eat, they say, a particular earth, the taste of which they find agreeable, without suffering any inconvenience.

They seek in our islands for the earth most similar to this, and prefer a yellowish red volcanic tufa.

It is sold secretly in our public markets; but this is an abuse which the police ought to correct.

The negroes who have this habit are so fond of caouac, that no chastisement will prevent their eating it."

In the Indian Archipelago, at the island of Java, Labillardiere saw, between Surabaya and Samarang, little square and reddish cakes exposed for sale.

These cakes called tanaampo, were cakes of clay, slightly baked, which the natives eat with relish.

The attention of physiologists, since my return from the Orinoco, having been powerfully directed to these phenomena of geophagy, M. Leschenault (one of the naturalists of the expedition to the Antarctic regions under the command of captain Baudin) has published some curious details on the tanaampo, or ampo, of the Javanese.

"The reddish and somewhat ferruginous clay," he says "which the inhabitants of Java are fond of eating occasionally, is spread on a plate of iron, and baked, after having been rolled into little cylinders in the form of the bark of cinnamon.

In this state it takes the name of ampo, and is sold in the public markets.

This clay has a peculiar taste, which is owing to the baking: it is very absorbent, and adheres to the tongue, which it dries.

In general it is only the Javanese women who eat the ampo, either in the time of pregnancy, or in order to grow thin; the absence of plumpness being there regarded as a kind of beauty.

The use of this earth is fatal to health; the women lose their appetite imperceptibly, and take only with relish a very small quantity of food; but the desire of becoming thin, and of preserving a slender shape, induces them to brave these dangers, and maintains the credit of the ampo."

The savage inhabitants of New Caledonia also, to appease their hunger in times of scarcity, eat great pieces of a friable Lapis ollaris.

Vauquelin analysed this stone, and found in it, beside magnesia and silex in equal portions, a small quantity of oxide of copper.

M.

Goldberry had seen the negroes in Africa, in the islands of Bunck and Los Idolos, eat an earth of which he had himself eaten, without being incommoded by it, and which also was a white and friable steatite.

These examples of earth-eating in the torrid zone appear very strange.

We are struck by the anomaly of finding a taste, which might seem to belong only to the inhabitants of the most sterile regions, prevailing among races of rude and indolent men, who live in the finest and most fertile countries on the globe.

We saw at Popayan, and in several mountainous parts of Peru, lime reduced to a very fine powder, sold in the public markets to the natives among other articles of food.

This powder, when eaten, is mingled with coca, that is, with the leaves of the Erythroxylon peruvianum.

It is well known that Indian messengers take no other aliment for whole days than lime and coca: both excite the secretion of saliva, and of the gastric juice; they take away the appetite, without affording any nourishment to the body.

In other parts of South America, on the coast of Rio de la Hacha, the Guajiros swallow lime alone, without adding any vegetable matter to it.

They carry with them a little box filled with lime, as we do snuff-boxes, and as in Asia people carry a betel-box.

This American custom excited the curiosity of the first Spanish navigators.

Lime blackens the teeth; and in the Indian Archipelago, as among several American hordes, to blacken the teeth is to beautify them.

In the cold regions of the kingdom of Quito, the natives of Tigua eat habitually from choice, and without any injurious consequences, a very fine clay, mixed with quartzose sand.

This clay, suspended in water, renders it milky.

We find in their huts large vessels filled with this water, which serves as a beverage, and which the Indians call agua or leche de llanka.

* (* Water or milk of clay.

Llanka is a word of the general language of the Incas, signifying fine clay.

) When we reflect on these facts, we perceive that the appetite for clayey, magnesian, and calcareous earth is most common among the people of the torrid zone; that it is not always a cause of disease;

and that some tribes eat earth from choice, whilst others (as the Ottomacs in America, and the inhabitants of New Caledonia in the Pacific) eat it from want and to appease hunger.

A great number of physiological phenomena prove that a temporary cessation of hunger may be produced though the substances that are submitted to the organs of digestion may not be, properly speaking, nutritive.

The earth of the Ottomacs, composed of alumine and silex, furnishes probably nothing, or almost nothing, to the composition of the organs of man.

These organs contain lime and magnesia in the bones, in the lymph of the thoracic duct, in the colouring matter of the blood, and in white hairs; they afford very small quantities of silex in black hair; and, according to Vauquelin, but a few atoms of alumine in the bones, though this is contained abundantly in the greater part of those vegetable substances which form part of our nourishment.

It is not the same with man as with animated beings placed lower in the scale of organization.

In the former, assimilation is exerted only on those substances that enter essentially into the composition of the bones, the muscles, and the medullary matter of the nerves and the brain.

Plants, on the contrary, draw from the soil the salts that are found accidentally mixed in it; and their fibrous texture varies according to the nature of the earths that predominate in the spots which they inhabit.

An object well worthy of research, and which has long fixed my attention, is the small number of simple substances (earthy and metallic) that enter into the composition of animated beings, and which alone appear fitted to maintain what we may call the chemical movement of vitality.

We must not confound the sensations of hunger with that vague feeling of debility which is produced by want of nutrition, and by other pathologic causes.

The sensation of hunger ceases long before digestion takes place, or the chyme is converted into chyle.

It ceases either by a nervous and tonic impression exerted by the aliments on the coats of the stomach; or, because the digestive apparatus is filled with substances that excite the mucous membranes to an abundant secretion of the gastric juice.

To this tonic impression on the nerves of the stomach the prompt and salutary effects of what are called nutritive medicaments may be attributed, such as chocolate, and every substance that gently stimulates and nourishes at the same time.

It is the absence of a nervous stimulant that renders the solitary use of a nutritive substance (as starch, gum, or sugar) less favourable to assimilation, and to the reparation of the losses which the human body undergoes.

Opium, which is not nutritive, is employed with success in Asia, in times of great scarcity; it acts as a tonic.

But when the matter which fills the stomach can be regarded neither as an aliment, that is, as proper to be assimilated, nor as a tonic stimulating the nerves, the cessation of hunger is probably owing only to the secretion of the gastric juice.

We here touch upon a problem of physiology which has not been sufficiently investigated.

Hunger is appeased, the painful feeling of inanition ceases, when the stomach is filled.

It is said that this viscus stands in need of ballast; and every language furnishes figurative expressions which convey the idea that a mechanical distension of the stomach causes an agreeable sensation.

Recent works of physiology still speak of the painful contraction which the stomach experiences during hunger, the friction of its sides against one another, and the action of the gastric juice on the texture of the digestive apparatus.

The observations of Bichat, and more particularly the fine experiments of Majendie, are in contradiction to these superannuated hypotheses.

After twenty-four, forty-eight, or even sixty hours of abstinence, no contraction of the stomach is observed; it is only on the fourth or fifth day that this organ appears to change in a small degree its dimensions.

The quantity of the gastric juice diminishes with the duration of abstinence.

It is probable that this juice, far from accumulating, is digested as an alimentary substance.

If a cat or dog be made to swallow a substance which is not susceptible of being digested, a pebble for instance, a mucous and acid liquid is formed abundantly in the cavity of the stomach, somewhat resembling in its composition the gastric juice of the human body.

It appears to me very probable, that when the want of aliments compels the Ottomacs and the inhabitants of New Caledonia to swallow clay and steatite during a part of the year, these earths occasion a powerful secretion of the gastric and pancreatic juices in the digestive apparatus of these people.

The observations which I made on the banks of the Orinoco, have been recently confirmed by the direct experiments of two distinguished young physiologists, MM.

Cloquet and Breschet.

After long fasting they ate as much as five ounces of a silvery green and very flexible laminar talc.

Their hunger was completely satisfied, and they felt no inconvenience from a kind of food to which their organs were unaccustomed.

It is known that great use is still made in the East of the bolar and sigillated earths of Lemnos, which are clay mingled with oxide of iron.

In Germany the workmen employed in the quarries of sandstone worked at the mountain of Kiffhauser spread a very fine clay upon their bread, instead of butter, which they call steinbutter* (stone-butter).

(* This steinbutter must not be confounded with the mountain butter (bergbutter) which is a saline substance, produced by a decomposition of aluminous schists.

) The state of perfect health enjoyed by the Ottomacs during the time when they use little muscular exercise, and are subjected to so extraordinary a regimen, is a phenomenon difficult to be explained.

It can be attributed only to a habit prolonged from generation to generation.

The structure of the digestive apparatus differs much in animals that feed exclusively on flesh or on seeds; it is even probable that the gastric juice changes its nature, according as it is employed in effecting the digestion of animal or vegetable substances;

yet we are able gradually to change the regimen of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, to feed the former with flesh, and the latter with vegetables.

Man can accustom himself to an extraordinary abstinence and find it but little painful if he employ tonic or stimulating substances (various drugs, small quantities of opium, betel, tobacco, or leaves of coca); or if he supply his stomach, from time to time, with earthy insipid substances that are not in themselves fit for nutrition.

Like man in a savage state some animals, when pressed by hunger in winter, swallow clay or friable steatites;

such are the wolves in the northeast of Europe, the reindeer and, according to the testimony of M. Patrin, the kids in Siberia.

The Russian hunters, on the banks of the Yenisei and the Amour, use a clayey matter which they call rock-butter, as a bait.

The animals scent this clay from afar, and are fond of the smell; as the clays of bucaro, known in Portugal and Spain by the name of odoriferous earths (tierras olorosas), have an odour agreeable to women.

* (* Bucaro (vas fictile odoriferum).

People are fond of drinking out of these vessels on account of the smell of the clay.

The women of the province of Alentejo acquire a habit of masticating the bucaro earth; and feel a great privation when they cannot indulge this vitiated taste.

) Brown relates in his History of Jamaica that the crocodiles of South America swallow small stones and pieces of very hard wood, when the lakes which they inhabit are dry, or when they are in want of food.

M.

Bonpland and I observed in a crocodile, eleven feet long, which we dissected at Batallez, on the banks of the Rio Magdalena, that the stomach of this reptile contained half-digested fish, and rounded fragments of granite three or four inches in diameter.

It is difficult to admit that the crocodiles swallow these stony masses accidentally, for they do not catch fish with their lower jaw resting on the ground at the bottom of the river.

The Indians have framed the absurd hypothesis that these indolent animals like to augment their weight, that they may have less trouble in diving.

I rather think that they load their stomach with large pebbles to excite an abundant secretion of the gastric juice.

The experiments of Majendie render this explanation extremely probable.

With respect to the habit of the granivorous birds, particularly the gallinaceae and ostriches, of swallowing sand and small pebbles, it has been hitherto attributed to an instinctive desire of accelerating the trituration of the aliments in a muscular and thick stomach.

We have mentioned that tribes of Negroes on the Gambia mingle clay with their rice.

Some families of Ottomacs were perhaps formerly accustomed to cause the maize and other farinaceous seeds to rot in their poya, in order to eat earth and amylaceous matter together: possibly it was a preparation of this kind, that Father Gumilla described indistinctly in the first volume of his work when he affirms that the Guamos and the Ottomacs feed upon earth only because it is impregnated with the sustancia del maiz (substance of maize) and the fat of the cayman.

I have already observed that neither the present missionary of Uruana, nor Fray Juan Gonzales, who lived long in those countries, knew anything of this mixture of animal and vegetable substances with the poya.

Perhaps Father Gumilla has confounded the preparation of the earth which the natives swallow with the custom they still retain (of which M. Bonpland acquired the certainty on the spot) of burying in the ground the beans of a species of mimosacea,* (* Of the genus Inga.

) to cause them to enter into decomposition so as to reduce them into a white bread, savoury, but difficult of digestion.

I repeat that the balls of poya, which we took from the winter stores of the Indians, contained no trace of animal fat, or of amylaceous matter.

Gumilla being one of the most credulous travellers we know, it almost perplexes us to credit facts which even he has thought fit to reject.

In the second volume of his work he however gainsays a great part of what he advanced in the first; he no longer doubts that half at least (a lo menos) of the bread of the Ottomacs and the Guamos is clay.

He asserts, that children and full grown persons not only eat this bread without suffering in their health, but also great pieces of pure clay (muchos terrones de pura greda.

) He adds that those who feel a weight on the stomach physic themselves with the fat of the crocodile which restores their appetite and enables them to continue to eat pure earth.

* (* Gumilla volume 2 page 260. ) It is certain that the Guamos are very fond, if not of the fat, at least of the flesh of the crocodile, which appeared to us white, and without any smell of musk.

In Sennaar, according to Burckhardt, it is equally esteemed, and sold in the markets.