Evidence is used among these people in a manner very different from the forms of our courts of justice. They rarely admit it on both sides of the question; nor does the witness first make a general oath to speak the truth, and nothing but the truth. When a fact is to be established, either on the part of the plaintiff or of the defendant, he is asked if he can produce any evidence to the truth of what he asserts. On answering in the affirmative he is directed to mention the person. This witness must not be a relation, a party concerned, nor even belong to the same dusun. He must be a responsible man, having a family, and a determinate place of residence. Thus qualified, his evidence may be admitted. They have a settled rule in respect to the party that is to produce evidence. For instance; A. sues B. for a debt: B. denies the debt: A. is now to bring evidence to the debt, or, on failure thereof, it remains with B. to clear himself of the debt by swearing himself not indebted. Had B. acknowledged that such a debt had formerly subsisted but was since paid, it would be incumbent on B. to prove the payment by evidence, or on failure it would rest with A. to confirm the debt's being still due, by his oath. This is an invariable mode, observed in all cases of property. OATHS. As their manner of giving evidence differs from ours so also does the nature of an oath among them differ from our idea of it. In many cases it is requisite that they should swear to what it is not possible in the nature of things they should know to be true. A. sues B. for a debt due from the father or grandfather of B. to the father or grandfather of A. The original parties are dead and no witness of the transaction survives. How is the matter to be decided? It remains with B. to make oath that his father or grandfather never was indebted to those of A.; or that if he was indebted the debt had been paid. This, among us, would be esteemed a very strange method of deciding causes; but among these people something of the kind is absolutely necessary. As they have no sort of written accounts, nor anything like records or registers among them, it would be utterly impossible for the plaintiff to establish the debt by a positive proof in a multitude of cases; and were the suit to be dismissed at once, as with us, for want of such proof, numbers of innocent persons would lose the debts really due to them through the knavery of the persons indebted, who would scarce ever fail to deny a debt. On the side of the defendant again; if he was not permitted to clear himself of the debt by oath, but that it rested with the plaintiff only to establish the fact by a single oath, there would be a set of unprincipled fellows daily swearing debts against persons who never were indebted to any of their generation. In such suits, and there are many of them, it requires no small discernment to discover, by the attendant circumstances, where the