ds, which some wear round their
necks as a solitaire, and others as bracelets, upon their wrists: These
are common to both sexes, but the women have, besides, strings or
girdles of beads, which they wear round their waists, and which serve
to keep up their petticoat. Both sexes had their ears bored, nor was
there a single exception that fell under our notice, yet we never saw an
ornament in any of them; we never, indeed, saw either man or woman in
any thing but what appeared to be their ordinary dress, except the king
and his minister, who in general wore a kind of night-gown of coarse
chintz, and one of whom once received us in a black robe, which appeared
to be made of what is called prince's stuff. We saw some boys, about
twelve or fourteen years old, who had spiral circles of thick brass-wire
passed three or four times round their arms, above the elbow, and some
men wore rings of ivory, two inches in breadth, and above an inch in
thickness, upon the same part of the arm; these, we were told, were the
sons of the rajas, or chiefs, who wore those cumbrous ornaments as
badges of their high birth.

Almost all the men had their names traced upon their arms, in indelible
characters of a black colour, and the women had a square ornament of
flourished lines, impressed in the same manner, just under the bend of
the elbow. We were struck with the similitude between these marks and
those made by tattowing in the South-Sea islands, and upon enquiring
into its origin, we learnt that it had been practised by the natives
long before any Europeans came among them, and that in the neighbouring
islands the inhabitants were marked with circles upon their necks and
breasts. The universality of this practice, which prevails among savages
in all parts of the world, from the remotest limits of North America, to
the islands in the South-Seas, and which probably differs but little
from the method of staining the body that was in use among the ancient
inhabitants of Britain, is a curious subject of speculation.[107]

[Footnote 107: In the account which Mr Bossu has given of some Indians
who inhabit the banks of the Akanza, a river of North America, which
rises in New Mexico, and falls into the Mississippi, he relates the
following incident: "The Akanzas," says he, "have adopted me, and as a
mark of my privilege, have imprinted the figure of a roebuck upon my
thigh, which was done in this manner: An Indian having burnt some straw,
diluted th