Or, if we turn from this melancholy picture, which will suggest copious matter for philosophical speculation, can we, without astonishment, observe to what a degree of perfection the same tribe (and indeed we may here join, in some of those instances, the American tribes visited in the course of the present voyage) have carried their favourite amusements, the plaintive songs of their women, their dramatic entertainments, their dances, their olympian games, as we may call them, the orations of their chiefs, the chants of their priests, the solemnity of their religious processions, their arts and manufactures, their ingenious contrivances to supply the want of proper materials, and of effective tools and machines, and the wonderful productions of their persevering labour under a complication of disadvantages, their cloth and their mats, their weapons, their fishing instruments, their ornaments, their utensils, which in design and in execution may vie with whatever modern Europe or classical antiquity can exhibit? It is a favourite study with the scholar to trace the remains of Grecian or Roman workmanship; he turns over his Montfaucon with learned satisfaction; and he gazes with rapture on the noble collection of Sir William Hamilton. The amusement is rational and instructive. But will not his curiosity be more awakened, will he not find even more real matter for important reflection, by passing an hour in surveying the numerous specimens of the ingenuity of our newly-discovered friends, brought from the utmost recesses of the globe to enrich the British Museum, and the valuable repository of Sir Ashton Lever? If the curiosities of Sir Ashton's Sandwich-room alone were the only acquisition gained by our visits to the Pacific Ocean, who, that has taste to admire, or even eyes to behold, could hesitate to pronounce that Captain Cook had not sailed in vain? The expence of his three voyages did not, perhaps, far exceed that of digging out the buried contents of Herculaneum. And we may add, that the novelties of the Society or Sandwich Islands seem better calculated to engage the attention of the studious in our times, than the antiquities which exhibit proofs of Roman magnificence.