in expectation or in reality, he had no longer any care; on the contrary, every moment of life was an acquisition, the gain of a good that was considered as lost. Such is nearly the situation of a soldier in war, and such is really that of the savage throughout the whole course of his life. If this be happiness, wretched indeed must be the country where it is an object of envy. In pursuing my investigation, I do not find that I am led to more advantageous ideas of the liberty of the savage; on the contrary, I sees in him only the slave of his wants, and of the freaks of a sterile and parsimonious nature. Food he has not at hand; rest is not at his command; he must run, weary himself, endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and all the inclemency of the elements and seasons; and as the ignorance in which he was born and bred gives him or leaves him a multitude of false and irrational ideas and superstitious prejudices, he is likewise the slave of a number of errors and passions, from which civilized man is exempted by the science and knowledge of every kind that an improved state of society has produced."--Volney's _Travels in the United States_, p. 467. "Their impassible fortitude and endurance of suffering are, after all, in my mind, the result of a greater degree of physical insensibility. It has been told me, and I believe it, that in amputation and other surgical operations, their nerves do not shrink, do not show the same tendency to spasm with those of the whites. When the savage, to explain his insensibility to cold, called upon the white man to recollect how little his own face was affected by it, in consequence of its constant exposure, he added, 'My body is all face.'[246] This increasing insensibility, transmitted from generation to generation, finally becomes inwrought with the whole web of animal nature, and the body of the savage seems to have little more sensibility than the hoofs of horses."--Flint's _Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi_. See, also, Ulloa's _Notic. Amer._, p. 313. Charlevoix quotes a passage from Cicero to the effect that "l'habitude au travail donne de la facilite a supporter la douleur."--2 _Tusc._, 25.] [Footnote 246: Delicacy of skin is observed to be in proportion to civilization among nations, in proportion to degrees of refinement among individuals.--Sharon Turner.]