Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/136

130 fever. Generations of outdoor life had failed to protect these children of Nature against the effects of a brief exposure to a concentrated lung-poison; nay, its effect upon their unprepared organism was more violent than that experienced by persons in whom habit had established a sort of "physiological tolerance"—akin to the strange adaption that enables habitués to swallow enormous doses of arsenic and opium. For Professor Bates, in his "Naturalist on the River Amazon," states that the natives of Western Brazil have learned by sad experience to avoid a visit to the interior of a white man's dwelling, as travelers in Java would shun the valley of the Upas Tree. Catarrh germs, in their organism, take the form of consumption-microbes, and there appears to be no cure for that disease in the sweltering river swamps of the tropics. The stricken native coughs night and day, and the disease in that virulent modification of its development, terminates life in less than two years. The Quahiba Indians, adds the same traveler, would sooner load the horse of a Caucasian visitor with presents than carry their hospitality to the fatal degree of allowing him to pass a night in their cabins. "Do you bring influenza, Señor?" they