They imagine that their punctual performance of religious offices procures for them every temporal blessing. And as they believe that the animating and powerful influence of the divine spirit is every where diffused, it is no wonder that they join to this many superstitious opinions about its operations. Accordingly, they believe that sudden deaths, and all other accidents, are effected by the immediate action of some divinity. If a man only stumble against a stone and hurt his toe, they impute it to an _Eatooa_; so that they may be literally said, agreeably to their system, to tread enchanted ground. They are startled in the night on approaching a _toopapaoo_, where the dead are exposed, in the same manner that many of our ignorant and superstitious people are with the apprehensions of ghosts, and at the sight of a church-yard; and they have an equal confidence in dreams, which they suppose to be communications either from their god, or from the spirits of their departed friends, enabling those favoured with them to foretell future events; but this kind of knowledge is confined to particular people. Omai pretended to have his gift. He told us, that the soul of his father had intimated to him in a dream, on the 26th of July 1776, that he should go on shore at some place within three days; but he was unfortunate in this first attempt to persuade us that he was a prophet; for it was the 1st of August before we got into Teneriffe. Amongst them, however, the dreamers possess a reputation little inferior to that of their inspired priests and priestesses, whose predictions they implicitly believe, and are determined by them in all undertakings of consequence. The priestess who persuaded Opoony to invade Ulietea, is much respected by him; and he never goes to war without consulting her. They also, in some degree, maintain our old doctrine of planetary influence; at least, they are sometimes regulated in their public counsels by certain appearances of the moon; particularly when lying horizontally, or much inclined on the convex part, on its first appearance after the change, they are encouraged to engage in war with confidence of success.