As a familiar example of the abuse of the jeringa, may be mentioned the vulgar practice of resorting to it in disorders attendant on dentition. Sometimes the increased action of the bowels is indiscreetly stopped by astringents thus adhibited, and a fatal determination of blood to the head ensues; but it more frequently happens that the contrary practice is pursued, and stimulant remedies are administered, which either increase the existing disease, or transmute it into a dysentery. On such occasions the skilful practitioner may endeavour in vain to convince the mother that her child’s gastric ailment does not proceed from the presence of the dire empacho. When, as often happens during the progress of teething, children are suffered to eat all sorts of sweets, fruit, and unwholesome diet, or permitted to partake of strong food used by adults, and ill-suited to the more delicate organs of the tender child, then, no doubt, empacho or indigestion may be traced, in many cases, as a co-existing cause of the irritation and disturbance in the bowels, to which the offspring of white parents are more particularly subject in Lima. Complicated cases of this nature demand a prudent modification in treatment. Yet such instances are not so frequent as others, independent of indigestion, and in which a moderate bowel complaint is so far from being injurious that it is most salutary, as a natural protection against affections of the head during the process of teething. It is a peculiarity connected with the religious belief and popular customs of the country, that diseases of infancy and early childhood are too lightly considered by the native physician. The reason assigned for this is the devout one, that little innocents are exempted from the pangs of Purgatory, which must be borne by adults for the purification of their souls; and that therefore, for the child, it is happiness to die. We have heard the physician offer this consolation to a weeping mother in the higher ranks of society. He softly assured her that her pretty babe would pass through Purgatory to Paradise without as much as scorching a finger in the transit. In the lower and middle ranks especially, this religious dogma seems to stifle the natural emotions of the heart; for, evidently forgetting that even “Jesus wept,” they celebrate with music and dancing the death of the dearest object of a fond parent’s affection, who, as her child is consigned to a niche in the Pantheon, bedecks her person, grown thin by previous care and watching, and now she smiles in her robes of white, as if these were indeed no emblems of torn affection! V. _Sangria sobre el empacho._—To bleed a patient affected with empacho is, by the common consent of the vulgar, declared to be a most unpardonable blunder; and this is the meaning of the expression, “Sangria sobre el empacho!” when ejaculated in the apartments of the sick.