Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/374

316 increase them as long as luxuries can be invented and riches found for the purchase of them. How soon these luxuries degenerate into necessaries may be sufficiently evinced by the universal use of strong liquors, tobacco, spices, tea, etc. In this instance, again, Providence seems to act the part of a leveller, doing much towards putting all ranks into an equal state of wants, and consequently of real poverty: the great and magnificent want as much, and maybe more, than the middle classes: they again in proportion more than the inferior, each rank looking higher than its station, but confining itself to a certain point above which it knows not how to wish, not knowing at least perfectly what is there enjoyed.

Tools among these people we saw almost none, indeed, having no arts which require any, it is not to be expected that they should have many. A stone sharpened at the edge and a wooden mallet were the only ones that we saw formed by art: the use of these we supposed to be to make the notches in the bark of high trees by which they climb them for purposes unknown to us; and for cutting and perhaps driving in wedges to take off the bark which they must have in large pieces for making canoes, shields, and water-buckets, and also for covering their houses. Besides these they use shells and corals to scrape the points of their darts, and polish them with the leaves of a kind of wild fig-tree (Ficus radula), which bites upon wood almost as keenly as our European shave-grass, used by the joiners. Their fish-hooks are very neatly made of shell, and some are exceedingly small: their lines are also well twisted, and they have them from the size of a half-inch rope to almost the fineness of a hair, made of some vegetable.

Of netting they seem to be quite ignorant, but make their bags, the only thing of the kind we saw among them, by laying the threads loop within loop, something like knitting, only very coarse and open, in the very same manner as I have seen ladies make purses in England. That they had no sharp instruments among them we ventured to guess from the circumstance of an old man