ceremonies of initiation, as they have been called, which are practised among some other savage nations on the admission of an individual to any new degree of honour or chieftainship. Among many nations of the American Indians, indeed, this cutting and marking of the person is one of the principal inflictions to which the aspirant is required to submit on such occasions. Thus, in the account which Rochefort, in his “History of the Antilles,” gives us of the initiation of a warrior among the people of those islands, it is stated that the father of the young man, after a very rude flagellation of his son, used to proceed to scarify (as he expresses it) his whole body with a tooth of the animal called the “acouti”; and then, in order to heal the gashes thus made, he rubbed into them an infusion of pimento, which occasioned an agonizing pain to the poor patient; but it was indispensable that he should endure the whole, adds our author, without the least contortion of countenance or any other evidence of suffering. Wherever, indeed, the spirit of war has entered largely into the institutions of a people, as it has almost always done among savage and imperfectly civilized nations, we find traces of similar observances. Something of the same object which has just been attributed to the tattooing of the New Zealanders, and the more complicated ceremonies of initiation practised