howling like wolves, and so discharging their office with abundance of hypocrisy and art." The reader will meet with a pretty full account of the funeral ceremonies among some of the eastern nations, in Dr Scott's introduction to his recent edition of the Arabian Nights Entertainments.--E.] Of the religion of these people, we were not able to acquire any clear and consistent knowledge: We found it like the religion of most other countries, involved in mystery, and perplexed with apparent inconsistencies. The religious language is also here, as it is in China, different from that which is used in common; so that Tupia, who took great pains to instruct us, having no words to express his meaning which we understood, gave us lectures to very little purpose: What we learnt, however, I will relate with as much perspicuity as I can. Nothing is more obvious to a rational being, however ignorant or stupid, than that the universe and its various parts, as far as they fall under his notice, were produced by some agent inconceivably more powerful than himself; and nothing is more difficult to be conceived, even by the most sagacious and knowing, than the production of them from nothing, which among us is expressed by the word _Creation_. It is natural therefore, as no Being apparently capable of producing the universe is to be seen, that he should be supposed to reside in some distant part of it, or to be in his nature invisible, and that he should have originally produced all that now exists in a manner similar to that in which nature is renovated by the succession of one generation to another; but the idea of procreation includes in it that of two persons, and from the conjunction of two persons these people imagine every thing in the universe either originally or derivatively to proceed.