It is to be observed, also, that marriages do not, as a general fact, take place among the aborigines before the period at which the body has attained its full vigor. The men seldom marry before thirty, and the women before twenty years of age. Abortion, one of the most frequent mishaps with women of civilized life, is almost entirely unknown among the Indians. They nurse their children for two years, and often longer, and during this whole period they utterly refuse the embraces of the opposite sex. The manual labor to which they are constantly subjected, and their hardy habits generally, tend powerfully to invigorate their bodies, and although they are, during pregnancy, exempted from the more laborious parts of duty, they are always habitually active. Nature is their only midwife; and according to Dr. Rush, “each woman is delivered in a private cabin, without so much as one of her own sex to attend her. After washing herself in cold water, she returns soon to the usual employments of her station;” so that, according to the authority just quoted, “she knows nothing of those accidents which proceed from the carelessness or ill-management of midwives, or those weaknesses which arise from a month’s confinement in a warm room.” It is, indeed, said on good authority, that if, during journeys, the Indian woman is taken in labor, she merely falls back for a little on her way in the forest, delivers herself, and then shortly makes up to her companions with her new-born child on her back. The most natural state of the female constitution, and one which is connected with the best and firmest health, is that of pregnancy and nursing; and it is a remarkable fact, that there is seldom a period during the interval between marriage and the cessation of the menstrual function in which the Indian women are not either pregnant or giving suck. Among other nations than the aborigines of our own country, we find also striking examples of the freedom from suffering with which childbirth is endured. Thus, according to Stephenson’s “Twenty Years’ Residence in South America,” “among the Araucanian Indians of South America, a mother, immediately on her delivery, takes her child, and going down to the nearest stream of water, washes herself and it, and returns to the usual labors of her station.”