We Saw At Popayan, And In Several Mountainous Parts Of Peru, Lime Reduced To A Very Fine Powder, Sold In The Public Markets To The Natives Among Other Articles Of Food.

This powder, when eaten, is mingled with coca, that is, with the leaves of the Erythroxylon peruvianum.

It is well known that Indian messengers take no other aliment for whole days than lime and coca: both excite the secretion of saliva, and of the gastric juice; they take away the appetite, without affording any nourishment to the body. In other parts of South America, on the coast of Rio de la Hacha, the Guajiros swallow lime alone, without adding any vegetable matter to it. They carry with them a little box filled with lime, as we do snuff-boxes, and as in Asia people carry a betel-box. This American custom excited the curiosity of the first Spanish navigators. Lime blackens the teeth; and in the Indian Archipelago, as among several American hordes, to blacken the teeth is to beautify them. In the cold regions of the kingdom of Quito, the natives of Tigua eat habitually from choice, and without any injurious consequences, a very fine clay, mixed with quartzose sand. This clay, suspended in water, renders it milky. We find in their huts large vessels filled with this water, which serves as a beverage, and which the Indians call agua or leche de llanka.* (* Water or milk of clay. Llanka is a word of the general language of the Incas, signifying fine clay.)

When we reflect on these facts, we perceive that the appetite for clayey, magnesian, and calcareous earth is most common among the people of the torrid zone; that it is not always a cause of disease; and that some tribes eat earth from choice, whilst others (as the Ottomacs in America, and the inhabitants of New Caledonia in the Pacific) eat it from want and to appease hunger. A great number of physiological phenomena prove that a temporary cessation of hunger may be produced though the substances that are submitted to the organs of digestion may not be, properly speaking, nutritive. The earth of the Ottomacs, composed of alumine and silex, furnishes probably nothing, or almost nothing, to the composition of the organs of man. These organs contain lime and magnesia in the bones, in the lymph of the thoracic duct, in the colouring matter of the blood, and in white hairs; they afford very small quantities of silex in black hair; and, according to Vauquelin, but a few atoms of alumine in the bones, though this is contained abundantly in the greater part of those vegetable substances which form part of our nourishment. It is not the same with man as with animated beings placed lower in the scale of organization. In the former, assimilation is exerted only on those substances that enter essentially into the composition of the bones, the muscles, and the medullary matter of the nerves and the brain. Plants, on the contrary, draw from the soil the salts that are found accidentally mixed in it; and their fibrous texture varies according to the nature of the earths that predominate in the spots which they inhabit.

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