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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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.
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