Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/230

172 for their prayers by the surviving relations. During the ceremony emblematical devices are made use of; a young plantain tree signifies the deceased, and a bundle of feathers the deity invoked. Opposite to this the priest places himself, often attended by relations of the deceased, and always furnished with a small offering of some kind of eatables intended for the god. He begins by addressing the god by a set form of sentences, and during the time he repeats them employs himself in weaving cocoanut leaves into different forms, all which he disposes upon the grave where the bones have been deposited; the deity is then addressed by a shrill screech, used only on that occasion, and the offering presented to his representative (the little tuft of feathers), which after this is removed, and everything else left in statu quo, to the no small emolument of the rats, who quietly devour the offering.

Religion has been in all ages, and is still in all countries, clothed in mysteries inexplicable to human understanding. In the South Sea Islands it has still another disadvantage to any one who desires to investigate it: the language in which it is conveyed, or at least many words of it, is different from that of common conversation; so that although Tupia often showed the greatest desire to instruct us in it, he found it almost impossible. It is only necessary to remember how difficult it would be to reconcile the apparent inconsistencies of our own religion to the faith of an infidel, and to recollect how many excellent discourses are daily read to instruct even us in the faith which we profess, to excuse me when I declare that I know less of the religion of these people than of any other part of their policy. What I do know, however, I shall here write down, hoping that inconsistencies may not appear to the eye of the candid reader as absurdities.

This universe and its marvellous parts must strike the most stupid with a desire of knowing from whence they themselves and it were produced; their priests, however, have not ideas sufficiently enlarged to adopt that of creation. That this world should have been originally created from