wear rings not only through their noses, lips, cheeks, and on their
toes, but also weighty gimmals of gold thrust through their paps and
buttocks; where, in eating, they wipe their fingers upon their thighs,
genitories, and the soles of their feet: where children are
excluded, and brothers and nephews only inherit; and elsewhere,
nephews only, saving in the succession of the prince: where, for the
regulation of community in goods and estates, observed in the country,
certain sovereign magistrates have committed to them the universal
charge and overseeing of the agriculture, and distribution of the
fruits, according to the necessity of every one: where they lament the
death of children, and feast at the decease of old men; where they lie
ten or twelve in a bed, men and their wives together: where women,
whose husbands come to violent ends, may marry again, and others
not: where the condition women is looked upon with such contempt, that
they kill all the native females, and buy wives of their neighbors
to supply their use; where husbands may repudiate their wives
without showing any cause, but wives cannot part from their
husbands, for what cause soever; where husbands may sell their wives
in case of sterility; where they boil the bodies of their dead, and
afterward pound them to a pulp, which they mix with their wine, and
drink it; where the most coveted sepulture is to be eaten with dogs,
and elsewhere by birds; where they believe the souls of the blessed
live in all manner of liberty, in delightful fields, furnished with
all sorts of delicacies, and that it is these souls, repeating the
words we utter, which we call echo; where they fight in the water, and
shoot their arrows with the most mortal aim, swimming; where, for a
sign of subjection, they lift up their shoulders, and hang down
their heads; where they put off their shoes when they enter the king's
palace; where the eunuchs, who take charge of the sacred women,
have, moreover, their lips and noses cut off, that they may not be
loved; where the priests put out their own eyes, to be better
acquainted with their demons, and the better to receive their oracles;
where every one makes to himself a deity of what he likes best; the
hunter of a lion or a fox, the fisher of some fish; idols of every
human action or passion; in which place, the sun, the moon, and the
earth are the principal deities, and the form of taking an oath is, to
touch the earth, looking up to heaven; where both flesh and fish is
eaten raw; where the greatest oath they take is, to swear by the
name of some dead person of reputation, laying their hand upon his
tomb; where the new year's gift the king sends every year to the
princes, his vassals, is fire, which being brought, all the old fire
is put out, and the neighboring people are bound to fetch the new,
every one for themselves, upon pain of high treason; where, when the
king, to betake himself wholly to devotion, retires from his
administration (which often falls out), his next successor is
obliged to do the same, and the right of the kingdom devolves to the
third in succession; where the vary the form of government,
according to the seeming necessity of affairs; depose the king when
they think good, substituting certain elders to govern in his stead,
and sometimes transferring it into the hands of the commonalty;
where men and women are both circumcised and also baptized; where
the soldier, who in one or several engagements, has been so
fortunate as to present seven of the enemies' heads to the king, is
made noble: where they live in that rare and unsociable opinion of the
mortality of the soul; where the women are delivered without pain or
fear: where the women wear copper leggings upon both legs, and if a
louse bite them, are bound in magnanimity to bite them again, and dare
not marry, till first they have made their king a tender of their
virginity, if he please to accept it: where the ordinary way of
salutation is by putting a finger down to the earth, and then pointing
it up toward heaven: where men carry burdens upon their heads, and
women on their shoulders; where the women make water standing, and the
men squatting: where they send their blood in token of friendship, and
offer incense to the men they would honor, like gods: where, not
only to the fourth, but in any other remote degree, kindred are not
permitted to marry: where the children are four years at nurse, and
often twelve; in which place, also, it is accounted mortal to give the
child suck the first day after it is born: where the correction of the
male children is peculiarly designed to the fathers, and to the
mothers of the girls; the punishment being to hang them by the
heels in the smoke: where they circumcise the women: where they eat
all sorts of herbs, without other scruple than of the badness of the
smell: where all things are open- the finest houses, furnished in
the richest manner, without doors, windows, trunks, or chests to lock,
a thief being there punished double what they are in other places:
where they crack lice with their teeth like monkeys, and abhor to
see them killed with one's nails: where in all their lives they
neither cut their hair nor pare their nails; and, in another place,
pare those of the right hand only, letting the left grow for
ornament and bravery: where they suffer the hair on the right side
to grow as long as it will, and shave the other; and in the
neighboring provinces, some let their hair grow long before, and
some behind, shaving close the rest: where parents let out their
children, and husbands their wives, to their guests to hire: where a
man may get his own mother with child and fathers make use of their
own daughters or sons, without scandal: where at their solemn feasts
they interchangeably lend their children to one another, without any
consideration of nearness of blood. In one place, men feed upon
human flesh; in another, 'tis reputed a pious office for a man to kill
his father at a certain age; elsewhere, the fathers dispose of their
children, while yet in their mothers' wombs, some to be preserved
and carefully brought up, and others to be abandoned or made away.
Elsewhere the old husbands lend their wives to young men; and in
another place they are in common, without offense; in one place
particularly, the women take it for a mark of honor to have as many
gay fringed tassels at the bottom of their garment, as they have
lain with several men. Moreover, has not custom made a republic of
women separately by themselves? has it not put arms into their
hands, and made them raise armies and fight battles? And does she not,
by her own precept, instruct the most ignorant vulgar, and make them