ation: Shooting poisoned arrows through the blowpipe.

_p._ 205.]

Often they strive so for more than an hour but at last the serpent is
suffocated and is reduced to a lifeless mass. Then its victors carry it
triumphantly to their village where it makes a banquet for almost all
the inhabitants.

* * * * *

The Sakais would find but a scanty result from their hunting and
shooting-, and their own lives would not be sufficiently protected if
the forest did not provide them with an inexhaustible and infallible
means of dealing death with their blowpipes and darts.

There is such a rich and varied quantity of plants growing in the jungle
which produce poison, that Man has the choice of using the one he deems
more adapted for this or that particular need.

The Sakai is enthusiastic over his poisons, so much is he engrossed in
the science that it takes with him the post of a besetting. Like a
maniac which always speaks of his strange fancies, so this poor savage
speaks all day long of his poisons, and studies their qualities.

And they provide him with all the necessaries for his primitive
existence for he utilizes them in shooting, fishing, and in setting
traps for big and small animals, they are a defence for himself and the
whole village where he lives, besides furnishing him with the means (by
barter) of obtaining tobacco, rice or any other article that cannot be
found in the forest.

All his best intellectual faculty is consecrated to the research and
preparation of poisons because it must not be thought that he uses one
instead of the other indifferently. Those with which he is most familiar
are each used as the occasion may require.

Just as a gun is not loaded with the same sized shot when shooting small
birds and partridges, the Sakai does not waste his strong poisons when a
weaker one would be equally effectual.

His selection of one rather than the other is frequently regulated by
the state of the atmosphere (damp being pernicious to venomous
productions) and sometimes by the phases of the moon.

These plants are herbaceous, arboreous and often creepers, but not all
those that grow in the forest, nor even those known to the savage for
their efficacy, are yet in the knowledge of Science.

This is a very great pity as I fear that these medicinal treasures,
which may contain miraculous properties, will be inevitably lost if a
scientific study of this wild jungle produce is n