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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M.
Bonpland And I Observed In A Crocodile, Eleven Feet Long, Which We
Dissected At Batallez, On The Banks Of The Rio Magdalena, That The
Stomach Of This Reptile Contained Half-Digested Fish, And Rounded
Fragments Of Granite Three Or Four Inches In Diameter.
It is difficult
to admit that the crocodiles swallow these stony masses accidentally,
for they do not catch fish with their lower jaw resting on the ground
at the bottom of the river.
The Indians have framed the absurd
hypothesis that these indolent animals like to augment their weight,
that they may have less trouble in diving. I rather think that they
load their stomach with large pebbles to excite an abundant secretion
of the gastric juice. The experiments of Majendie render this
explanation extremely probable. With respect to the habit of the
granivorous birds, particularly the gallinaceae and ostriches, of
swallowing sand and small pebbles, it has been hitherto attributed to
an instinctive desire of accelerating the trituration of the aliments
in a muscular and thick stomach.
We have mentioned that tribes of Negroes on the Gambia mingle clay
with their rice. Some families of Ottomacs were perhaps formerly
accustomed to cause the maize and other farinaceous seeds to rot in
their poya, in order to eat earth and amylaceous matter together:
possibly it was a preparation of this kind, that Father Gumilla
described indistinctly in the first volume of his work when he affirms
that the Guamos and the Ottomacs feed upon earth only because it is
impregnated with the sustancia del maiz (substance of maize) and the
fat of the cayman. I have already observed that neither the present
missionary of Uruana, nor Fray Juan Gonzales, who lived long in those
countries, knew anything of this mixture of animal and vegetable
substances with the poya. Perhaps Father Gumilla has confounded the
preparation of the earth which the natives swallow with the custom
they still retain (of which M. Bonpland acquired the certainty on the
spot) of burying in the ground the beans of a species of mimosacea,*
(* Of the genus Inga.) to cause them to enter into decomposition so as
to reduce them into a white bread, savoury, but difficult of
digestion. I repeat that the balls of poya, which we took from the
winter stores of the Indians, contained no trace of animal fat, or of
amylaceous matter. Gumilla being one of the most credulous travellers
we know, it almost perplexes us to credit facts which even he has
thought fit to reject. In the second volume of his work he however
gainsays a great part of what he advanced in the first; he no longer
doubts that half at least (a lo menos) of the bread of the Ottomacs
and the Guamos is clay. He asserts, that children and full grown
persons not only eat this bread without suffering in their health, but
also great pieces of pure clay (muchos terrones de pura greda.) He
adds that those who feel a weight on the stomach physic themselves
with the fat of the crocodile which restores their appetite and
enables them to continue to eat pure earth.* (* Gumilla volume 2 page
260.) It is certain that the Guamos are very fond, if not of the fat,
at least of the flesh of the crocodile, which appeared to us white,
and without any smell of musk.
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