As the Abipones deprive their eyes of brows and lashes, pierce their lips and ears, prick their faces with thorns and mark them with figures, pluck the down from their chins, and pull up a quantity of hair from the fore part of their heads, I always greatly wondered at their preserving the nose untouched and unhurt, the cartilage of which the Africans, Peruvians, and Mexicans formerly perforated, sometimes inserting a string of beads into the hole. According to Father Joseph Acosta, book VII. chap. 17, Tikorìk, king of the Mexicans, wore a fine emerald suspended from his nostrils. The Brazilians from their earliest age perforate not the lower lip alone but also other parts of the face, inserting very long pebbles into the fissures; a frightful spectacle, as the Jesuit Maffei affirms in the second book of his History of the Indies. You would call the faces of the Brazilians tesselated work or mosaic. But the Parthians delighted still more in deforming themselves; for, according to Tertullian, Lib. I., cap. 10. De Cultu Fœmin, they pierced almost every part of their bodies for the admission of pebbles or precious stones. If Diodorus Siculus Lib. IV. cap. 1. may be credited, the female Negroes bordering on Arabia perforated their lips for the same purpose. From all this it appears that the savages of America are not the only people who have adopted the foolish custom of marking their bodies in various ways. CHAPTER VI. OF THE STRENGTH AND LONGEVITY OF THE ABIPONES.