always upon them.

CRIMES.

The crimes committed here against the order and peace of society are said
not to be numerous. Theft amongst themselves is almost unknown, being
strictly honest in their dealings with each other; but when discovered
the offender is made answerable for double the value of the goods stolen.
Pilfering indeed from strangers, when not restrained by the laws of
hospitality, they are expert at, and think no moral offence; because they
do not perceive that any ill results from it. Open robbery and murder are
punishable with death if the parties are unable to redeem their lives by
a sum of money. A person guilty of manslaughter is obliged to bear the
expense attending the interment of the deceased and the funeral-feast
given to his friends, or, if too poor to accomplish this it is required
of his nearest relation, who is empowered to reimburse himself by selling
the offender as a slave. In cases of double adultery the man, upon
detection, is punished with death, in the manner that shall presently be
described; but the woman is only disgraced, by having her head shaven and
being sold for a slave, which in fact she was before. This distribution
of justice must proceed upon the supposition of the females being merely
passive subjects, and of the men alone possessing the faculties of free
agents. A single man concerned in adultery with a married woman is
banished or outlawed by his own family. The lives of culprits are in
almost all cases redeemable if they or their connections possess property
sufficient, the quantum being in some measure at the discretion of the
injured party. At the same time it must be observed that, Europeans not
being settled amongst these people upon the same footing as in the
pepper-districts, we are not so well acquainted either with the principle
or the practice of their laws.

EXTRAORDINARY CUSTOM.

The most extraordinary of the Batta customs, though certainly not
peculiar to these people, remains now to be described. Many of the old
travellers had furnished the world with accounts of anthropophagi or
maneaters, whom they met with in all parts of the old and new world, and
their relations, true or false, were in those days, when people were
addicted to the marvellous, universally credited. In the succeeding ages,
when a more skeptical and scrutinizing spirit prevailed, several of these
asserted facts were found upon examination to be false; and men, from a
bias inherent in o