y of their
nourishment, were reduced to a state of semi-idiocy. The men hardly
seemed to have the strength and energy to walk or even stand up--although
I must confess, to my regret, that they had not yet lost the power of
talking.

Their features were unattractive. Eyes wide apart and widely expanded, so
that the entire circle of the iris was exposed, although the eyeball
itself was not _a fleur de tete_, but rather sunk into excessively
spacious orbital cavities in the skull. The part of the eyeball which is
usually white was yellow with them, softened somewhat by luxuriant
eyelashes of abnormal length. In fact, the only thing that seemed
plentiful and vigorous with them was the hair, which grew abundantly and
luxuriantly everywhere, just as bad grass and weeds do on uncultivated or
abandoned lands. There was a lot of hair everywhere--on the scalp, on the
eyebrows, on the men's unshaven cheeks, on the chest, the arms, hands,
and the legs. It is, I believe, a well-known fact that hair is generally
more luxuriant, the weaker and more anaemic the subject is--up to a
certain point.

Deep grooves and hollow cheeks--the latter due to absence of
teeth--marked the faces of even young men. Then one of the most
noticeable peculiarities was the extraordinary development, prominence
and angularity of the apple of the throat. The ears--which to my mind
show the real character and condition of health of a person more than any
other visible part of his or her anatomy--were large and prominent,
occasionally well-formed, but lacking colour and the delightful,
well-chiselled, vigorous curves of healthy, normal, intelligent people.
The hands and feet were generally small and well-shaped, in wonderful
condition--though not necessarily clean--owing to the inborn reluctance
which all the people of Brazil have towards manual labour.

It has always been my experience that, generally speaking, malformed
people possess distorted brains--which does not mean at all that the
brain of a malformed person may not perhaps develop in a marvellous
manner in one particular direction. What I maintain is that, with few
possible exceptions, the brains of malformed people are seldom perfectly
balanced. In those particular subjects it did not take a deep student of
human nature to set down the entire crowd of them as visionaries, most
fantastically inclined--in which direction, having no restraint whatever,
they ran absolutely amuck.

Yet there was some