[Footnote 19:  One likes to see the exercise of human ingenuity even on trifles.  It flatters the consciousness of one’s own powers, and affords, too, the ground-work of a comparison nowise disadvantageous to what one believes of his own capabilities.  Man has been defined by a certain writer, an animal that uses instruments for the accomplishment of his purposes.  But the definition is faulty in one important point; it does not exclude some beings which are not of the species.  It is perhaps impossible to furnish an adequate definition of his nature within the compass of a single logical proposition.  And what matter?  Every man in his senses knows what man is, and can hardly ever be necessitated to clothe his conception of him, in language metaphysically unexceptionable.  But if any trait be more characteristic than another, that of invention may safely be asserted to have the pre-eminence.  Man, in effect, evinces the superiority of his nature over all other animals, by a faculty which he seems exclusively to enjoy, in common with his Maker, of creating systems, plans, and objects, by the exercise of an understanding and will adapted to certain ends fore-seen and predetermined.  No tribes of mankind are totally destitute of this intellectual agency, which is proof, that none are without the merciful visitations of that great beneficent Being from whom the universe has its existence.  A canoe, a house, a basket, indicates mind.  Mind, by the very constitution of our nature, indicates power and authority.  Reason, indeed, may dispute the necessity or the propriety of such connections in our thoughts and feelings, but reason cannot possibly set them aside, or eradicate them from the human breast, though aided by all that dislike and fear of the solemn truth which the conviction of guilt or demerit never fails to produce.  These Otaheitans, then, are evidences to themselves of the existence of a power and wisdom superior to their own, to which they are consciously accountable; and they are without excuse, if, knowing this, they do not worship God as they ought.  It may amuse, and perhaps instruct the reader, which is the reason for introducing this note, to enquire how far the inventions of the Otaheitans, as of all other people, made any way necessary or desirable by the circumstance of their climate and situation, influence them in their notions on the subject of their national religions.  He will find that amongst them, as amongst others, the popular religion is founded, not on the exercise of reason contemplating the works of nature and the dispensations of Providence, but on principles intimately connected with man’s physical wants, and modified by the peculiarities of ingenuity, which the artificial supply of those wants occasions; and perhaps he will make out one remarkable conclusion from the survey of them compared with others—­that where these arts of ingenuity are frequent, and at the same time applied to very perishable subjects, there the objects of worship and the kind of religious