of it with great indifference.  The Erreoes are only those of the better sort, who, from their fickleness, and their possessing the means of purchasing a succession of fresh connexions, are constantly roaming about; and, from having no particular attachment, seldom adopt the more settled method mentioned above.  And so agreeable is this licentious plan of life to their disposition, that the most beautiful of both sexes thus commonly spend their youthful days, habituated to the practice of enormities which would disgrace the most savage tribes; but are peculiarly shocking amongst a people whose general character, in other respects, has evident traces of the prevalence of humane and tender feelings.[3] When an Erreoe woman is delivered of a child, a piece of cloth, dipped in water, is applied to the mouth and nose, which suffocates it.

[Footnote 3:  That the Caroline Islands are inhabited by the same tribe or nation, whom Captain Cook found, it such immense distances, spread throughout the South Pacific Ocean, has been satisfactorily established in some preceding notes The situation of the Ladrones, or Marianne Islands, still farther north than the Carolines, but at no great distance from them, is favourable, at first sight, to the conjecture, that the same race also peopled that cluster; and, on looking into Father Le Gobien’s history of them, this conjecture appears to be actually confirmed by direct evidence.  One of the greatest singularities of the Otaheite manners, is the existence of the society of young men called Erreoes, of whom some account is given in the preceding paragraph.  Now we learn from Father Le Gobien, that such a society exists also amongst the inhabitants of the Ladrones.  His words are:  Les Urritoes sont parmi eux les jeuns gens qui vivent avec des maitresses, sans vouloir s’engager dans les liens du mariage.  That there should be young men in the Ladrones, as well as in Otaheite, who live with mistresses, without being inclined to enter into the married state, would not, indeed, furnish the shadow of any peculiar resemblance between them.  But that the young men in the Ladrones, and in Otaheite, whose manners are thus licentious, should be considered as a distinct confraternity, called by a particular name; and that this name should be the same in both places:  this singular coincidence of custom, confirmed by that of language, seems to furnish an irrefragable proof of the inhabitants of both places being the same nation.  We know, that it is the general property of the Otaheite dialect, to soften the pronunciation of its words.  And, it is observable, that, by the omission of one single letter (the consonant t), our Arreoys (as spelled in Hawkesworth’s collection), or Erreoes (according to Mr Anderson’s orthography), and the Urritoes of the Ladrones, are brought to such a similitude of sound (the only rule of comparing two unwritten languages), that we may pronounce them to be the same word, without exposing ourselves to the sneers of supercilious criticism.