he place (as they do) of our nails and
cramp-irons, beams, posts, and rafters. The whole palm-leaf roof is
fastened, and artificially interwoven and intertwined, with tough
creepers of nearly an inch thickness....

In the hot lowlands of the Amazon, in the shade of endless forest, there
is many an herb of mysterious virtue, as yet known only to wild Indian
tribes, while the fame of others has already spread over the ocean. Who
has not heard of the _urary_, or _curare_, the quick arrow-poison which,
in the hands of clever physiologists and physicians, promises not only
to become a valuable drug, but to give us interesting disclosures on the
activity of the nerves?

The wondrous tales of former travellers regarding the preparation of
this urary have been rectified long ago. The venom of snakes is not used
for it, but the juice of the bruised stems and leaves of several kinds
of strychnos and apocyneas is simply boiled over a coal fire, mixed with
tobacco-juice and capsicum (Spanish pepper), and thickened with the
sticky milk of some Euphorbiacea to a hard mass. This manipulation,
moreover, is not undertaken by the old squaws of the tribe, devoting
themselves to a painful death thereby, as the old stories ran, but, as
there is no danger whatever, by the young wives of the warriors, who
look upon it as part of their household duties, or by the men
themselves. There are about eight or ten different poisons of similar,
but not identical, composition and preparation, of which the urary of
the Macusi Indians, and the curare, from Venezuela and New Granada, are
considered the most powerful.

This dark-brown, pitchy substance, usually kept in little earthen pots,
is lightly spread over the points of the weapons,--their long arrows,
their light spears, and the thin wooden shafts, of about a foot long,
which they shoot through immense blow-tubes (_sarabacanas_). Immediately
upon the diffusion in the blood of the slightest portion of the poison,
the limbs, one by one, refuse to work, as if overcome with torpor, while
the mind apparently retains its activity until death ensues, which it
does in a few minutes' time, from palsy of the lungs. It is strange that
only those nerves are affected which regulate the movements depending on
our own will, whereas those movements we cannot control--the beating of
the heart, for example--continue unaltered to the very last. Experiments
made by French physicians upon animals have shown that, if t