Restrain your laughter, friendly reader, when you hear that the Abipones honour their physicians with the title of _Keebèt_, which same word has the several significations of the devil, a physician, a prophet, and a malevolent sorcerer. From which it appears how widely the office of physician extends with them, and what various kinds of knowledge it embraces. They revere physicians as the representatives of their grandfather, the evil spirit, and, believing them gifted by him with the art of healing diseases, dignify them with his honourable title of _Keebèt_. But I openly pronounce these Abiponian physicians worthy of contempt and ridicule, for they never learnt even the rudiments of medical science, never entered a school of the kind, nor ever acquired the least smattering of pharmacy, botany, anatomy, or nosology. These knaves deserve to be flogged every day of their lives by the angry Galen, and spit upon by Æsculapius, Hippocrates, and the whole tribe of physicians. For they thrust frauds instead of medicines, words instead of deeds upon the credulous Abipones, and are as well able to create as cure diseases, as ignorant in preparing a medicine as in composing a charm, and better skilled in weaving deceits than in relieving pains. It is remarkable in the Abiponian physicians that they cure every kind of disease with one and the same medicine. Let us examine their method of healing. They apply their lips to the part affected, and suck it, spitting after every suction. At intervals they draw up their breath from the very bottom of their breast, and blow upon that part of the body which is in pain. That blowing and sucking are alternately repeated. If the whole body languishes, if it burns with malignant heat, if it is seized with measles or small-pox, four or five of these harpies fly to suck and blow it, one fastening his lips on the arm, another on the side, a third and fourth on the feet. If a child cries, or refuses the breast, the mother gives him to a juggler to be sucked. This method of healing is in use amongst all the savages of Paraguay and Brazil, that I am acquainted with, and, according to Father Jean Grillet, amongst the Galibe Indians. I have known matter sucked from an ulcer and blood from a wound with utility, the materials of the corruption that would have ensued being by this means exhausted. Spaniards or Indians, when stung by a serpent, get some friend to suck the part affected, that the poison may be extracted before it spreads over the limbs. I do not therefore blame the Abipones for having their wounds, ulcers, and serpent-bites sucked: their superstition lies in suffering that office to be performed by none but the jugglers, and in believing the faculty of healing imparted to them by their grandfather. Though they at the same time believe that one excels another in the salubrity of his lips and breath, and in his healing powers. Another point in which this