ay be made respecting the disease observable at
Otaheite, which, as the reader will find in the text, is said to have
been cured by _simples_ known to the inhabitants. This is most unlikely,
if that disease were really the Lues Venerea, as is alleged, and had not
existed among them previous to the arrival of Europeans; though what
Lawson says in his account of the natives of North Carolina does
undoubtedly yield material evidence to such an opinion. "They cure,"
says he, "the pox, which is frequent among them, by a berry that
salivates, as mercury does; yet they use sweating and decoctions very
much with it; as they do, almost on every occasion; and when they are
thoroughly heated, they leap into the river." The natives of Madagascar
too are said to cure this disease by similar treatment. But the reader's
patience, perhaps, is exhausted, and it is full time to conclude this
long note. On the whole, it seems probable enough, that this disease is
not the product of any one particular country, and from it propagated
among others by communication, but is the result of certain
circumstances not indeed yet ascertained, but common to the human race,
and of earlier occurrence in the world than is generally imagined.--E.]

It is impossible but that, in relating incidents, many particulars with
respect to the customs, opinions, and works of these people should be
anticipated; to avoid repetition therefore, I shall only supply
deficiencies. Of the manner of disposing of their dead much has been
said already. I must more explicitly observe, that there are two places
in which the dead are deposited; one a kind of shed, where the flesh is
suffered to putrify; the other an inclosure, with erections of stone,
where the bones are afterwards buried. The sheds are called _Tupapow_
and the inclosures _Morai_. The Morais are also places of worship.[29]

[Footnote 29: "It is the heaviest stone," says Sir Thomas Brown in his
curious work Hydriotaphia, "that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell
him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no farther state to
come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain."
But of such a conspiracy and assault against the best hopes of man,
these Otaheitans, we see, are by no means guilty. They look for another
existence after that one is finished, in which the body held an
inseparable companionship. By their mode of treating the dead, they seem
to study the perpetuity of friend