[Sidenote: The severity of the code based at bottom on superstition.] As the Malay peoples of the Indian Archipelago, from whom the foregoing examples are drawn, have reached a fair level of culture, it might perhaps be thought that the extreme severity with which they visit offences against their code of sexual morality springs from an excessive refinement of feeling rather than from a crude superstition; and no doubt it may well happen that extreme sensitiveness on the point of honour, of which the Malays are susceptible, contributes in many cases to sharpen the sword of justice {71} and add fresh force to the stroke. Yet under this delicacy of sentiment there appears to lie a deep foundation of superstition, as we may see by the extraordinary and disastrous influence which in the opinion of these people sexual crime exerts, not so much on the criminals themselves, as on the whole realm of nature, drawing down deluges of rain from the clouds till the crops rot in the fields, shaking the solid earth beneath men’s feet, and blowing up into flames the slumbering fires of the volcano, till the sky is darkened at noon by a black canopy of falling ashes and illumined at night by the sullen glow of the molten lava shot forth from the subterranean furnace.[71.1] [Sidenote: A similar severity in sexual matters observed among the Australian aborigines, the lowest of existing savages.] And however much an over-refinement of feeling may be invoked to explain the more than Puritanical severity of the Malay moral code in sexual matters, no such explanation can be applied to the like emotion of horror which similar offences excite among the savage aborigines of Australia, the lowest and the least refined probably of all the races of men about whom we possess accurate information. These rude savages also treated with rigorous severity all breaches of that widely ramified network of prohibitions in which throughout the Australian continent, before it fell under English rule, the two sexes lived immeshed. The whole community of a tribe or nation was commonly subdivided into a number of minute bodies, which we are accustomed to call classes or clans according to the principle on which they were variously constituted. No man might marry a woman of his own class or clan, and in most tribes his freedom of choice was still further limited by complex rules of marriage and descent which excluded him from seeking a wife in many more subdivisions of the tribe, and sometimes compelled him to look for her only in one out of them all. And the ordinary penalty for any violation of these rules was death. The offender was lucky who escaped with his life and a body more or less riddled with spear wounds. [Sidenote: Severe punishments inflicted for sexual offences among the aborigines of Victoria.] Thus one who knew the aborigines of Victoria well in the old days, before they were first contaminated and then destroyed by contact with