or immoderate incontinency.”  That a mistake exists in the early accounts as to the nature of the disease which was found at Hispaniola by the Spaniards, and by them on their return to Europe communicated to the French and Neapolitans, is very probable from the circumstance mentioned in them, that some vegetable substances, especially guiaicum, were effectual for its cure;—­since it is most certain, that the Lues Venerea of modern times is not at all destructible by such means, whereas there are several cutaneous affections which may be benefited by them.  A similar remark may 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.