SEPT. 1770 DRESS AND HABITS 349 
indeed, we never saw any one man dressed the whole time 
we were there in anything more than his ordinary clothes. 
Some boys of twelve or fourteen years of age wore circles of 
thick brass wire, passed screw-fashion three or four times 
round their arms above the elbow: and some men wore 
convex rings of ivory, two inches in breadth, and above an 
inch in thickness, in the same manner above the joint of the 
elbow. These we were told were the sons of Radjas, who 
alone had the privilege of wearing these cumbersome badges 
of high birth. 
Almost all the men had their names traced upon their 
arms in indelible characters of black; the women had a 
square ornament of flourished lines on the inner part of each 
arm, just under the bend of the elbow; on inquiring into 
the antiquity of this custom, so consonant with that of 
tattowing in the South Sea Islands, Mr. Lange told us that 
it had been among these people long before the Europeans 
came here, but was less used in this than in most islands 
in the neighbourhood, in some of which the people marked 
circles round their necks, breasts, ete. 
Both sexes are continually employed in chewing betel 
and areca; the consequence is that their teeth, as long as 
they have any, are dyed of that filthy black colour which 
constantly attends the rottenness of a tooth, for it appears 
to me that from their first use of this custom, which they 
begin very young, their teeth are affected and continue by 
gradual degrees to waste away till they are quite worn to 
the stumps, which seems to happen before old age. I have 
seen men, in appearance between twenty and thirty, whose 
fore teeth were almost entirely gone, no two being of the 
same length or the same thickness, but every one eaten to 
unevenness as iron is by rust. This loss of the teeth is 
attributed by all whose writings on the subject I have read, 
to the tough and stringy coat of the areca nut, but in my 
opinion is much more easily accounted for by the well- 
known corrosive quality of the lime, which is a necessary 
ingredient in every mouthful, and that too in no very 
insignificant quantity. This opinion seems to me to be 
