ts happiness, it is rather surprising, besides the humiliating
restraints they are laid under with regard to food, to find them often
treated with a degree of harshness, or rather brutality, which one
would scarcely suppose a man would bestow on an object for whom he had
the least affection. Nothing, however, is more common, than to see the
men beat them without mercy; and, unless this treatment is the effect
of jealousy, which both sexes, at least, pretend to be sometimes
infected with, it will be difficult to account for it. It will be
less difficult to admit this as the motive, as I have seen several
instances where the women have preferred personal beauty to interest;
though, I must own, that even in these cases, they seem scarcely
susceptible of those delicate sentiments that are the result of
mutual affection; and, I believe, that there is less Platonic love in
Otaheite than in any other country.

Cutting, or inciding the foreskin, should be mentioned here as a
practice adopted amongst them from a notion of cleanliness; and they
have a reproachful epithet in their language for those who do not
observe that custom. When there are five or six lads pretty well grown
up in a neighbourhood, the father of one of them goes to a _Tahoua_,
or man of knowledge, and lets him know. He goes with the lads to
the top of the hills, attended by a servant, and seating one of them
properly, introduces a piece of wood underneath the foreskin, and
desires him to look aside at something he pretends is coming; having
thus engaged the young man's attention to another object, he cuts
through the skin upon the wood with a shark's tooth, generally at one
stroke. He then separates, or rather turns back the divided parts; and
having put on a bandage, proceeds to perform the same operation on the
other lads. At the end of five days they bathe, and the bandages being
taken off, the matter is cleaned away. At the end of five days more
they bathe again, and are well; but a thickness of the prepuce,
where it was cut, remaining, they go again to the mountains with
the _Tahoua_ and servant; and a fire being prepared, and some stones
heated, the _Tahoua_ puts the prepuce between two of them, and
squeezes it gently, which removes the thickness. They then return
home, having their heads, and other parts of their bodies, adorned
with odoriferous flowers; and the _Tahoua_ is rewarded for his
services by their fathers, in proportion to their several abili