Some historians say, the Egyptian women anciently enjoyed a full liberty of intercourse with the males, which was not the case in the generality of eastern nations; and we must, therefore, think it was derived from Abyssinia; for there the women live, as it were, in common, and their enjoyments and gratification have no other bounds but their own will. They, however, pretend to have a principle, that, if they marry, they should be wives of one husband; and yet this principle does not bind, but, like most of the other duties, serves to reason upon, and to laugh at, in conversation. Herodotus tells it was the same with the Egyptians[81]. The Egyptians made no account of the mother what her state was; if the father was free, the child followed the condition of the father. This is strictly so in Abyssinia. The king’s child by a negro-slave, bought with money, or taken in war, is as near in succeeding to the crown, as any one of twenty children that he has older than that one, and born of the noblest women of the country. The men in Egypt[82] did neither buy nor sell; the same is the case in Abyssinia at this day. It is infamy for a man to go to market to buy any thing. He cannot carry water or bake bread; but he must wash the cloaths belonging to both sexes, and, in this function, the women cannot help him. In Abyssinia the men carried their burdens on their heads, the women on their shoulders, and this difference, we are told, obtained in Egypt[83]. It is plain, that this buying, in the public market, by women, must have ended whenever jealousy or sequestration of that sex began; for this reason it ended early in Egypt, but, for the opposite reason, it subsists in Abyssinia to this day. It was a sort of impiety in Egypt to eat a calf; and the reason was plain, they worshipped the cow. In Abyssinia, to this day, no man eats veal, although every one very willingly eats a cow. The Egyptian[84] reason no longer subsists as in the former case, but the prejudice remains, though they have forgot the reason. The Abyssinians eat no wild or water-fowl, not even the goose, which was a great delicacy in Egypt. The reason of this is, that, upon their conversion to Judaism, they were forced to relinquish their ancient municipal customs, as far as they were contrary to the Mosaical law; and the animals, in their country, not corresponding in form, kind, nor name, with those mentioned in the Septuagint, or original Hebrew, it has followed, that there are many of each class that know not whether they are clean or not; and a wonderful confusion and uncertainty has followed through ignorance or mistake, being unwilling to violate the law in any one instance through not understanding it.