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Product Description This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1832. Excerpt:... scattered around, which the servants of Government had not time to inter. I would, therefore, from a review of all the circumstances related, be inclined to estimate, that not more than one in a hundred of these poor creatures ever returned to their native country." Bombay Transactions, vol. i. p. 303. CHAPTER IV. INDIAN NOTCH. THROWING THE COCOA-NUT. We hear the fatal truth, that " in the midst of life we are in death" repeated so often, and in such a variety of tones, that our ear becomes accustomed to the sound, without its arresting the attention. The warning accordingly produces but little effect upon our thoughts, and still less upon our conduct. Such being the case, it may often prove highly useful to seize upon such accidental circumstances as those described in the last Chapter, in order to turn them to account, as illustrations of maxims of which no one can be said actually to doubt the truth, but to which few attach much importance, or only such as goes, practically, for little or nothing. By a strange kind of obliquity, however, in our moral vision, it would appear that the direct view of such instruction as we may find in the beautiful text above quoted, is not always the most efficacious. For example, it must be confessed (and, I suppose, we ought to own it with shame), that we may witness even the effects of a famine without many other feelings being excited than that of intense curiosity. At all events, I fear it never occurred to me at the time to extract any moral lesson out of the wholesale work which death was then making before my eyes, rill an accident induced me to turn the picture round, and I then speculated to some purpose on the reverse view which presented itself to the imagination. One day, after havi