The Guaycurus are of medium stature, well made, healthy, robust, and appear formed to the most painful and laborious undertakings. They eat many times in the day, very slowly, and their provisions are generally over-dressed, and cooked without any attention to cleanliness. They never suffer from indigestion. They are most particular in the diet which they use on occasions of their unfrequent indispositions. The scurvy never makes its appearance, and sudden deaths are never known. Bodily defects are exceedingly rare; blind persons sometimes are seen, but none are ever bald. Their teeth are almost universally irregular, in consequence of not extracting the first teeth of the youth when they change them, an omission arising from the tenderness with which they are treated; but they commonly retain them till death, although black enough, from the prodigious quantity of tobacco which they use. The women always carry a piece between the under lip and gums. They paint the body with the dye of the _urucu_ and _jenipapo_, in which operation much symmetry is preserved. The youth have no certain usage in the disposal of their lank hair; the aged shave their heads similar to the lay Franciscans. The women likewise shave their heads around, and clip the hair, leaving it three inches in length at the top. Their physiognomy is broad, and presents nothing agreeable in consequence of the dye which they introduce into the skin with thorns, forming lines, that commence at the roots of the hair, and terminate at the eyelids or the cheeks, and in some instances at the chin, where they give it the appearance of a chess board, an ash colour being so indelibly fixed, that it continues through life. They are usually wrapped up in a large cotton cloth, from the neck to the feet, striped with various colours; the more ostentatious ornament themselves with shells, the mother-pearl appearing outwards; some have upon them the figure of their horses, well drawn in black and white. Below this dress they wear a very wide girdle, called an _ayulate_; without which a girl from her birth is never seen. Ornamental strings of silver, in necklaces and bracelets for the arms and legs, and a plate of the same metal at the breast, are generally displayed, for the manufacture of which, a stone anvil and hammer are used. In former times, these ornaments consisted of wood, such as are yet seen amongst some of the poor. Early in life they become meagre, and their skins, as well as those of the men at an advanced age, are remarkably wrinkled.