swollen arms with fresh juice of the manioc; and on his recovery he has to shew his strength and skill in bending a bow.  This cruel ordeal is commonly repeated again and again, till the lad has reached his fourteenth year and can bear the agony without betraying any sign of emotion.  Then he is a man and can marry.  A lad’s age is reckoned by the number of times he has passed through the ordeal.[147] An eye-witness has described how a young Mauhe hero bore the torture with an endurance more than Spartan, dancing and singing, with his arms cased in the terrible mittens, before every cabin of the great common house, till pallid, staggering, and with chattering teeth he triumphantly laid the gloves before the old chief and received the congratulations of the men and the caresses of the women; then breaking away from his friends and admirers he threw himself into the river and remained in its cool soothing water till nightfall.[148] Similarly among the Ticunas of the Upper Amazon, on the border of Peru, the young man who would take his place among the warriors must plunge his arm into a sort of basket full of venomous ants and keep it there for several minutes without uttering a cry.  He generally falls backwards and sometimes succumbs to the fever which ensues; hence as soon as the ordeal is over the women are prodigal of their attentions to him, and rub the swollen arm with a particular kind of herb.[149] Ordeals of this sort appear to be in vogue among the Indians of the Rio Negro as well as of the Amazon.[150] Among the Rucuyennes, a tribe of Indians in the north of Brazil, on the borders of Guiana, young men who are candidates for marriage must submit to be stung all over their persons not only with ants but with wasps, which are applied to their naked bodies in curious instruments of trellis-work shaped like fantastic quadrupeds or birds.  The patient invariably falls down in a swoon and is carried like dead to his hammock, where he is tightly lashed with cords.  As they come to themselves, they writhe in agony, so that their hammocks rock violently to and fro, causing the hut to shake as if it were about to collapse.  This dreadful ordeal is called by the Indians a marake.[151]

[Custom of causing men and women to be stung with ants to improve their character and health or to render them invulnerable.]

The same ordeal, under the same name, is also practised by the Wayanas, an Indian tribe of French Guiana, but with them, we are told, it is no longer deemed an indispensable preliminary to marriage; “it is rather a sort of national medicine administered chiefly to the youth of both sexes.”  Applied to men, the marake, as it is called, “sharpens them, prevents them from being heavy and lazy, makes them active, brisk, industrious, imparts strength, and helps them to shoot well with the bow; without it the Indians would always be slack and rather sickly, would always have a little fever, and would lie perpetually