As there is surplus of everything here, evil gifts have been bestowed as well. Poisonous insects sting for life; the fierce jaguar and fatal vampire, whose velvet kisses are a death-brand, bite for life; so do snakes; and the huge boa crushes the bones of its victim. The strong attack the weak, the cunning inveigle the unwary. Injurious or beneficent, all must fight for life, joining in the great struggle. Each variety contends with every other, vegetation fights to keep out animals, animals with birds, insects with one another, and all against the water, whose level silently rises over its foes. So man must struggle against nature. The jungle is his only teacher. He takes from it what it offers. He is the mere imitator of the vegetable world, a product of it in modified form. He sees strife in air, earth, and water. His religion can conceive only strife of two extremes, dying and living, evil and good, one injurious, the other beneficial. Evil spirits inhabit birds and beasts and whirlpools of the mighty rivers. The dim forest is filled with powers of destruction. They lurk in the black lizard and less dangerous ones in the parroquets. Since all sickness is brought by evil spirits, it is they to whom prayers are made. Some jungle savages believe in a transformation into animals and name their children for them. If there are any thoughts of a future life, they are in jungle terms. After death these people wish to be turned into animals, which sometimes happens. “On the eighth day a red deer jumped from the grave and ran away into the forest. They did not see the soul enter the deer, but they saw the deer rise from the grave”! Some worship sun and moon, an Inca custom. But the moon with its phases and its weird shadows in the jungle is involved in special mystery. These savages understand the jungle, but facts plain to us compose their mystery. If a man is sick, something grows near by to set him all right again. They use nature’s remedies against her poisons, as they have learned from birds and beasts to do. They collect various sympathetic medicines, such as teeth of poisonous snakes, and carefully fix them in leaves and tubes of rushes--powerful specifics against headache and blindness. They fill flask-gourds with balsams, and collect odorous gum for incense.