p. [212].
The poison is lifted off the fire as soon as it has got to the consistency of a syrup and is of a dark reddish colour, the darts are dipped into it and its virulence is put to the test without waste of time. If the proof is satisfactory the thick fluid is poured into bamboo receptacles, covered with leaves, and a piece of deer-skin fastened over them with a band of scudiscio and finally the vases are collocated in the driest corner of the hut, from whence from time to time, they are carried near the fire to prevent that their contents should lose force through humidity.
Now the question is this: do the ingredients which the Bretak Sakai believes indispensable in this concoction augment the virulence of the legop?
I am inclined to doubt it a great deal as I do not think those two plants containing the glutinous juice are poisonous, or at least very little so, but that they are added merely to give denseness to the mixture or else from a false supposition of the indigenes.
And less still can serpents' teeth or crushed wasps have any influence in increasing the power of this poison, which is in itself intense.
Evidently the Sakais, well aware of the lethal effect of a bite from a serpent, think that by introducing into the wound, by means of their dart, a tiny portion of the organ which determines this effect, an equal result will follow.
He neither knows nor imagines that the tooth exercises a simple mechanical action in consequence of which the little reservoir of poison, being compressed, lets a drop fall into the wound produced by the bite.
But there is nothing to be surprised at in this because in history we learn that the superstitions and sorceries practised by more advanced races than the Sakais offer the most curious documents in proof of such odd reasoning.
It is enough to remember that in the time of Augustus the jaw bone of a female dog, which had been kept fasting, and a quill plucked from a screech-owl were required for the enchantments of Canidia, ossa ab ore rapta jejunae canis, plumanque nocturna strigis. And yet it was just at that period Rome had inherited from Greece the Philosophy of the Epicureans and that of the Sceptics and was maturing the poem of Lucretius Carus!