when we add to these the other woes of his catalogue,--prickly-heat,
ringworm, putrid-fever, "the growling of Col. Fougeaud, dry sandy
savannas, unfordable marshes, burning hot days, cold and damp nights,
heavy rains, and short allowance,"--we can hardly wonder that three
captains died in a month, and that in two months his detachment of
forty-two was reduced to a miserable seven.

Yet, through all this, Stedman himself kept his health. His theory of the
matter almost recalls the time-honored prescription of "A light heart and
a thin pair of breeches," for he attributes his good condition to his
keeping up his spirits and kicking off his shoes. Daily bathing in the
river had also something to do with it; and, indeed, hydropathy was first
learned of the West-India Maroons,--who did their "packing" in wet
clay,--and was carried by Dr. Wright to England. But his extraordinary
personal qualities must have contributed most to his preservation. Never
did a "meagre, starved, black, burnt, and ragged tatterdemalion," as he
calls himself, carry about him such a fund of sentiment, philosophy,
poetry, and art. He had a great faculty for sketching, as the engravings
in his volumes, with all their odd peculiarities, show; his deepest woes
he coined always into couplets, and fortified himself against hopeless
despair with Ovid and Valerius Flaccus, Pope's Homer and Thomson's
"Seasons." Above all reigned his passion for natural history, a ready
balm for every ill. Here he was never wanting to the occasion; and, to do
justice to Dutch Guiana, the occasion never was wanting to him. Were his
men sickening, the peccaries were always healthy without the camp, and
the cockroaches within; just escaping from a she-jaguar, he satisfies
himself, ere he flees, that the print of her claws on the sand is
precisely the size of a pewter dinner-plate; bitten by a scorpion, he
makes sure of a scientific description in case he should expire of the
bite; is the water undrinkable, there is at least some rational interest