Persons wasted to a skeleton, and with every symptom of fever and consumption, we have seen restored to health by daily eating and drinking the alfaroba. When seized with a violent disorder, or dangerously wounded, they recover by the use of this easily obtained remedy, or, like dogs, without any at all. I have often with horror beheld many of them wounded with various kinds of weapons, their side pierced, their bones and ribs broken, their breath drawn with difficulty, the blood streaming from their numerous wounds; themselves, in short, the breathing images of death. When I saw these very Abipones a few weeks afterwards, riding or drinking, in full health, I could attribute it to nothing but the strength of their constitutions; for it certainly could not be owing to their unskilful physicians and inefficacious medicines. Every one knows that small-pox and measles are almost the only, and by far the most calamitous pest by which America is exhausted. The Abipones take the infection like the other Indians, but seldom fall victims to the disease, though, whilst under its influence, they are less careful of themselves than the other natives. Owing to the more healthy temperature of their blood and humours, it does not cause either so much, or such noxious matter in them as it does in others. Of the small-pox I shall discourse more fully hereafter. They live and enjoy their health many years after they have been wounded with leaden bullets without ever suffering them to be extracted: as a proof of their strength they often showed us a bullet sticking, without injury, in their arm or foot, and offered it us to handle. It is still more remarkable that a musket ball seldom proves fatal to the Abipones, unless it strike the heart or the head: their Cacique, the renowned Kaapetraikin, received a ball of this kind into his forehead without any dangerous consequences. Considering these things I often wondered why the savages dreaded firearms so much, since they very rarely proved fatal to them. But as children are afraid of ignes fatui, though harmless; in like manner the Indians fear the report more than the ball, which they so often find to miss of its aim, and prove formidable to the air alone. These instances will, if I mistake not, do something towards convincing Europeans of the strength of the Abipones. Neither shall I ever be a convert to the opinion that the Americans are possessed of a duller and less acute sense of corporal inconvenience. The Abipones are highly sensible of the impressions of the elements, the injuries of weapons, and the pain arising from these causes, but are not so much overcome and exhausted by them as most others, either because they are blessed with a better temperature of blood and humours, and greater strength of limbs and muscles, or because the hardships they have been accustomed to from childhood, render them callous, or because their eager thirst after military fame impels them to deny that anything gives