Lewis and Clarke, the first
explorers of the Rocky Mountains, found Indian warriors ill with fever
and dysentery, rheumatism and paralysis, and Indian women in hysterics.
"The tooth-ache," said Roger Williams of the New England tribes, "is the
only paine which will force their stoute hearts to cry"; even the Indian
women, he says, never cry as he has heard "some of their men in this
paine"; but Lewis and Clarke found whole tribes who had abolished this
source of tears in the civilized manner, by having no teeth left. We
complain of our weak eyes as a result of civilized habits, and Tennyson,
in "Locksley Hall," wishes his children bred in some savage land, "not
with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books." But savage life
seems more injurious to the organs of vision than even the type of a
cheap edition; for the most vigorous barbarians--on the prairies, in
Southern archipelagos, on African deserts--suffer more from different
forms of ophthalmia than from any other disease; without knowing the
alphabet, they have worse eyes than if they were professors, and have
not even the melancholy consolation of spectacles.
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