Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/773

 future, however, presents also a grand work to be accomplished: the elevation of this specialty to the highest scientific and philanthropic plane.

The duty of the State to the insane may, therefore, be summed up in—

 1. The separate treatment of the curable and incurable insane under the same medical executive. 2. True hospital treatment for the curable insane with all the medical skill, nursing, and care, regardless of expense, which the character of the disease demands. 3. Simple, humane, custodial care of the incurable insane, at a moderate expense.



HE Botocudus are a rapidly disappearing tribe of Brazilian Indians. They inhabit the country along the upper portion of the Rio Doce, about three hundred miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro, and the region lying along the borders of the States of Bahia, Espirito Santo, and Minas Geraes, especially between the Rio Doce and Rio Pardo, and along the Sierra dos Aymorés. Although they are now in contact with civilization and fast yielding to and dying out before its gentle influences, it is not many years since they and the various branches of their great family occupied a large portion of southern Brazil, and were justly looked upon as the most ferocious of all the wild tribes of that country. But few travelers have seen anything of them, and these have observed only the straggling outskirts as it were of their tribe. Even to this day the latest and best maps of Brazil have written broadly across the vast region referred to, "But little known, and inhabited by Indians." In these dense and almost impenetrable forests they spend their lives, seldom or never visiting either the campos of the interior or the coast.

To judge of the stage of civilization of these Indians it is worth while knowing that they can not count, and that their reckoning is done by using the fingers and toes, and that even this does not go beyond twenty. The children are dirt-eaters, and are sold for slaves, often for the merest trifles. Formerly these people wore no clothing at all; nowadays they are coming more and more to use it. Their straight, deep black hair, high cheekbones, flat noses, complexion, and stature are all suggestive of the Mongolian race types.

It is not my purpose, however, to say much of the Botocudus 