The points of their spears always shine like silver. I was often ashamed for the Spaniards, when I saw them furnished with mean, dirty, and incommodious arms, in the presence of the Abipones, who ridiculed their poverty and laziness. Most of them make use of a reed, a rude stake, a knotty club, the bough of a tree, or a twisted piece of wood, with a broken sword or knife tied to the end of it. The richer sort have guns, but generally bad ones, fitter to terrify than to slay the enemy; and moreover, you will find few able to handle them properly. Remember that I am speaking of the Spanish husbandmen who are ordered to fight against the savages; for you never see the regular troops without the cities of Buenos-Ayres and Monte-Video. Bows as well as spears are made of the neterge. They are equal to a man's stature in length. When unbent, they are like a very straight stick, not being curved like the bows of the Turks and Tartars. The string of the bow is generally made of the entrails of foxes, or of very strong threads supplied by a species of palm. When about to shoot off their arrows, that they may be able to bend the cord forcibly without hurting their hands, they wear a kind of wooden gauntlet. The quiver is made of rushes, and adorned with woollen threads of various colours. The arrows, which are an ell and a palm in length, consist of a reed, to which a sharp point of bone, very hard wood, or iron is prefixed. Wooden points are more formidable than iron ones, but those of bone, which are made of a fox's leg, are the most to be dreaded of all; for they break in being extracted, and the part remaining in the body causes a swelling, and a very virulent ulcer, which leaves the wounded person no rest. Any wood, from being imbued with a kind of native poison, causes more pain and tumour than iron. The Abipones never poison their arrows, as is usual amongst many other people of America. The Chiquitos are dreaded by the neighbouring savages on this account, that if an arrow of theirs wound the outermost skin, and bring the least drop of blood, all the limbs will swell, and in the course of a few hours death will ensue. The deadly poison in which they dip their arrows, the Chiquitos, alone know how to prepare from the bark of an unknown tree, and to this day they reserve to themselves the knowledge of the cruel mystery. In hunting too they kill wild animals with arrows dipped in the same poison, and cutting out the wounded part of the body, eat them with safety, like the Guaranies, who fear not to feed on oxen stung to death by serpents, rejecting that part only which has been infected by the animal's tooth. Father Gumilla relates that the savages of the Orinoco prepare a most fatal poison to dip their arrows in.