VOL. LXVIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TUANSACTIONS. 317 



differ from all the other inhabitants of Sumatra in language, manners, and 

 customs. They have no religious worship, but have some confused idea of 3 

 superior beings ; 2 of which are of a benign nature ; and the 3d an evil genius, 

 whom they style Murgiso, and to whom they use some kind of incantation to 

 prevent his doing them hurt. They seem to think their ancestors are a kind of 

 superior beings, attendant on them always. They have no king, but live in 

 villages [Compongs] absolutely independent of each otlier, and perpetually at 

 war with each other : their villages they fortify very strongly with double fences 

 of camphire plank pointed, and placed with their points projecting outwards, and 

 between these fences they put pieces of bamboo, hardened by fire, and likewise 

 pointed, which are concealed by the grass, but will run quite through a man's 

 foot. Without these fences they plant a prickly species of bamboo, which 

 soon forms an impenetrable hedge. They never stir out of these Compongs 

 unarmed ; their arms are matchlock guns, which, as well as the powder, are 

 made in the country, and spears with long iron heads. They do not fight in an 

 open manner, but way-lay and shoot or take prisoner single people in the woods 

 or paddy-fields. These prisoners, if they happen to be the people who have 

 given the offence, they put to death and eat, and their skulls they hang up as 

 trophies in the houses where the unmarried men and boys eat and sleep. They 

 allow of polygamy : a man may purchase as many wives as he pleases ; but their 

 number seldom exceeds 8. They have no marriage ceremony ; bat, when the 

 purchase is agreed on by the father, the man kills a buffalo or a horse, invites 

 as many people as he can ; and he and the woman sit and eat together before the 

 whole company, and are afterwards considered as man and wife. If afterwards 

 the man chuses to part with his wife, he sends her back to her relations with all 

 her trinkets, but they keep the purchase-money ; if the wife dislikes her hus- 

 band, her relations must repay double the purchase-money. A man detected in 

 adultery is punished with death, and the body eaten by the offended party and 

 his friends : the woman becomes the slave of her husband, and is rendered in- 

 famous by cutting off her hair. Public theft is also punished with death, and 

 the body eaten. All their wives live in the same house with the husband, and 

 the houses have no partition ; but each wife has her separate fire-place. Girls 

 and unmarried women wear 6 or 8 large rings of thick brass wire about their 

 neck, and great numbers of tin rings in their ears ; but all these ornaments are 

 laid aside when they marry. 



They often preserve the dead bodies of their Rajas (by which name they call 

 every freeman that has property, of which there are sometimes one, sometimes 

 more, in one Compong, and the rest are vassals) for 3 months and upwards, 

 before they bury them : this they continue to do by putting the body into a 

 coffin well caulked with dammar, a kind of resin : they place the coffin in the 



