Besides professed sick-tenders, zamba housekeepers or head-servants, some women in the middle and humbler ranks, such as manteras, chocolateras, tenderas, cigareras, picanteras, pulperas, changaneras,—that is, female shopkeepers, chocolate and cigar venders, with a subordinate gradation of publicans, &c.—are always ready to talk, with confounding fluency and volubility, without knowledge, concerning qualities and temperaments; and they display a natural acuteness of metaphysical capacity, with a truly peripatetic nicety of discrimination, when, in a moment of oratorical excitement, they assign to certain mixtures and drinks ideal measures and degrees of the elementary qualities. Women skilled in such mysteries, and omniscient charlatans, run over the various combinations of the cold and hot, dry and humid, and all their resulting modifications of temperature and temperament, with apparently unerring precision, and with a graduated exactness which no chemist in Europe, with every advantage of science and apparatus, can pretend to equal in his elaborate investigations into the qualities and elements of bodies either living or inanimate. The particular temperament of the patient his intimate friends are supposed to know perfectly; and the doctor’s reply to any question that may be proposed to him on this subject will be considered, in many instances, as no bad test of his penetration and professional knowledge in other matters with which they do not presume to be themselves so well acquainted. In conformity with such prevailing impressions, when nurses are to be selected for the children of delicate mothers, preference is given to the black women, as their blood and milk are believed to be cooler and more refreshing than the same fluids are in women of a different race. The Indian woman, on the other hand, is considered inferior to the negress as a nurse, because she is believed to be of a comparatively hot temperament and constitution. The effect of the quality of the nurse’s milk is conceived to influence the future temperament of the infant that hangs on her breast; and it is sometimes assigned as a reason why an individual is of an ardent temperament, that when a child he had been weaned, or deprived of the breast, by giving him wine,—_se desteto con vino_. Colour is looked upon as an indication of constitutional temperament even in the lower animals. Thus, when one in town labours under hectic fever, or consumption, he is recommended to go to the country, and drink warm milk from a black cow, because it is allowed to be more cooling and febrifuge than the milk taken from a cow of any other colour.