The physician Roderigo Fonseca observes, "The plague was never seen either in the East or West Indies, but we know that in America a million Indians were destroyed by the small-pox not many years back, when no Spaniard took the infection. This disease was introduced amongst them by a Negro." I say nothing of the East Indies, being an utter stranger to them, but every one agrees that no plague ever raged in America: if you have read the contrary in any historian, remember that catarrh, ague, and diarrhea, if long and widely prevalent, are called the plague by the lower orders of Spaniards. The small-pox and measles too are not improperly denominated the plague by the Indians. We have also frequently experienced a murrain in cattle fatal to horses, oxen, and above all to mules; a disease induced not by the pestilence of the air, but by the badness of the pastures, or the scarcity of water. This sort of disorder may be truly called contagious, the mere contact with sick or dead bodies being infectious. Swelling of the head, and blood trickling from the nostrils were symptoms of the reigning disorder; the same signs too indicated the bites of serpents in animals. Mutilating the ear, and cutting the vein of the fore foot, were admirable remedies against the poison of that disease in mules, especially if salt were given them to lick. The paunches of the oxen slain to feed the Indians are daily thrown out, along with the bowels, into an open place, where all the horses and mules eagerly crowd to lick the garbage, because a sort of salt and nitre is created by the blood of which they are excessively fond. Therefore, whilst this dreadful murrain raged in our territories we daily sprinkled those entrails with salt, the salubrity of which is proved by the circumstance, that whilst numbers died in the neighbouring estates, very few sickened, and many recovered with us in the town of St. Joachim. It is beyond all controversy, that small-pox is the true plague of the Americans, and that it has been lately introduced into America, either by Europeans or Negroes. Hence the just complaint of the Indians. "The Europeans are fine people, truly! They have made liberal compensation for the infinity of gold and silver they have taken from us, by leaving us the plague of the small-pox." Indeed it is a well known fact that the number of Indians who have died of this disease during the two last centuries, defy all calculation. In the thirty Guarany towns some thirty thousand persons died of the small-pox in the year 1734.