en sanctuary.

By the Mosaic law, if a man left a widow without children his brother was
to marry her. Among the Sumatrans, with or without children, the brother,
or nearest male relation of the deceased, unmarried (the father
excepted), takes the widow. This is practised both by Malays and country
people. The brother, in taking the widow to himself, becomes answerable
for what may remain due of her purchase money, and in every respect
represents the deceased. This is phrased ganti tikar
bantal'nia--supplying his place on his mat and pillow.

CHASTITY OF THE WOMEN.

Chastity prevails more perhaps among these than any other people. It is
so materially the interest of the parents to preserve the virtue of their
daughters unsullied, as they constitute the chief of their substance,
that they are particularly watchful in this respect. But as marriages in
general do not take place so early as the forwardness of nature in that
climate would admit, it will sometimes happen, notwithstanding their
precaution, that a young woman, not choosing to wait her father's
pleasure, tastes the fruit by stealth. When this is discovered he can
oblige the man to marry her, and pay the jujur; or, if he chooses to keep
his daughter, the seducer must make good the difference he has occasioned
in her value, and also pay the fine, called tippong bumi, for removing
the stain from the earth. Prostitution for hire is I think unknown in the
country, and confined to the more polite bazaars, where there is usually
a concourse of sailors and others who have no honest settlement of their
own, and whom, therefore, it is impossible to restrain from promiscuous
concubinage. At these places vice generally reigns in a degree
proportioned to the number and variety of people of different nations who
inhabit them or occasionally resort thither. From the scenes which these
sea-ports present travellers too commonly form their judgment, and
imprudently take upon them to draw, for the information of the world, a
picture of the manners of a people.

The different species of horrid and disgustful crimes, which are
emphatically denominated, against nature, are unknown on Sumatra; nor
have any of their languages terms to express such ideas.

INCEST.

Incest, or the intermarriage of persons within a certain degree of
consanguinity, which is, perhaps (at least after the first degree),
rather an offence against the institutions of human prudence than a
natural crime,