tertian. The fever daily increased at sun-set, and did not leave me till morning. This feverish agitation, at the end of seven and twenty days, was succeeded by the tertian, after two fits of which I happily recovered. What I suffered, in my utter want of all necessaries, and what danger I underwent, need not be told here. Just as I am about to conclude my discourse on contagious disorders, a circumstance occurs to my mind worthy the critical examination of physicians. Whilst I was at the Cordoban estate of St. Catharine belonging to the Jesuits, at the approach of night, we beheld a fiery meteor, which bore the appearance of a very wide beam, and rolled sparkling through the midst of heaven to the opposite horizon. The Spanish strangers afterwards declared that it was visible to the whole province, and judged it portentous. We, who had learnt a sounder philosophy, gazed at that sudden splendour as calmly as at a firework, though it did in reality prove calamitous, being either the cause or the sign, or, at any rate, the concomitant of a deadly catarrh which prevailed over the whole of Tucuman, and in two years carried off a great number of Spaniards and Negroes. Almost at the same time when the fiery exhalation was seen, this epidemic disease, as they say, began. Though this dangerous pestilence visited all the cities without distinction, yet I think it raged with particular violence in the estates. Travelling from Cordoba to Sta. Fè, I met crowds of Spaniards carrying horns filled with the urine of sick persons for the inspection of the Cordoba empirics; for there are no real physicians in the whole provinces. You would hardly believe what faith the lower orders of Spaniards place in the inspection of urine, and how much they are deceived in this matter. CHAPTER XXIV. OF THE PHYSICIANS AND MEDICINES OF THE ABIPONES.