Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/172

finger to the ground, then raising it toward heaven; where the men carry burdens on their heads, the women on their shoulders:^[1] the latter make water standing, the men stooping; where they send some of their blood as a symbol of friendship, and burn incense, as to the gods, to the men whom they wish to honour; where kinship not only in the fourth, but in even more distant degrees, is a bar to marriage; where children are kept four years at nurse, and often twelve, and there too it is considered fatal to give a child the breast during the first day; where fathers have the duty of punishing the male children, and mothers, exclusively, the females; and the punishment is to smoke them while they are hung up by the feet; where the women are circumcised; where they eat all sorts of herbs, without other discrimination than that of refusing those which seem to them to have a bad odour; where every thing is open, and the houses, however beautiful and sumptuous they may be, have neither door nor window nor chest that can be locked, and thieves are punished twice as severely as elsewhere; where they kill lice with their teeth, as monkeys do, and think it horrible to see them crushed by the nails; where they never cut either the hair or the nails during life; other places where they cut the nails of the right hand only, those of the left hand being kept long for prettiness. (c) Where they let all the hair on the right side of the body grow as long as it can, and shave the left side clean;^[2] and in neighbouring provinces, in one they let the hair grow in front, in the other, behind, and shave the front.^[3] (b) Where fathers lend their children, husbands their wives, to be enjoyed by their guests, for pay; where a man can lawfully have children by his mother, and where fathers forgather with their daughters, and mothers with their sons; (c) where, on festal occasions, they lend^[4] their children one to another. (a) In one country human flesh is eaten; in another it is a pious duty to kill your father at a certain age; elsewhere, fathers decree, as to their

1. See Herodotus, II, 35.
2. See Idem, IV, 191.
3. See Idem, IV, 180.
4. The edition of 1595 adds here: sans distinction de parenté. We return now for a moment to the text of 1580.