Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Our Botanical Knowledge Of The
Plants Employed In Making Poison Can Be But Very Slowly Acquired.
Most
of the Indians who make poisoned arrows, are totally ignorant of the
nature of the venomous substances they use, and which they obtain from
other people.
A mysterious veil everywhere covers the history of
poisons and of their antidotes. Their preparation among savages is the
monopoly of the piaches, who are at once priests, jugglers, and
physicians; it is only from the natives who are transplanted to the
missions, that any certain notions can be acquired on matters so
problematical. Ages elapsed before Europeans became acquainted through
the investigation of M. Mutis, with the bejuco del guaco (Mikania
guaco), which is the most powerful of all antidotes against the bite
of serpents, and of which we were fortunate enough to give the first
botanical description.
The opinion is very general in the missions that no cure is possible,
if the curare be fresh, well concentrated, and have stayed long in the
wound, to have entered freely into the circulation. Among the
specifics employed on the banks of the Orinoco, and in the Indian
Archipelago, the most celebrated is muriate of soda.* (* Oviedo,
Sommario delle Indie Orientali, recommends sea-water as an antidote
against vegetable poisons. The people in the missions never fail to
assure European travellers, that they have no more to fear from arrows
dipped in curare, if they have a little salt in their mouths, than
from the electric shocks of the gymnoti, when chewing tobacco.
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