In administering an oath, if the matter litigated respects the property of the grandfather, all the collateral branches of the family descended from him are understood to be included in its operation: if the father's effects only are concerned, or the transaction happened in his lifetime, his descendants are included: if the affair regards only the present parties and originated with them, they and their immediate descendants only are comprehended in the consequences of the oath; and if any single one of these descendants refuses to join in the oath it vitiates the whole; that is, it has the same effect as if the party himself refused to swear; a case that not unfrequently occurs. It may be observed that the spirit of this custom tends to the requiring a weight of evidence and an increase of the importance of the oath in proportion as the distance of time renders the fact to be established less capable of proof in the ordinary way. Sometimes the difficulty of the case alone will induce the court to insist on administering the oath to the relations of the parties, although they are nowise concerned in the transaction. I recollect an instance where three people were prosecuted for a theft. There was no positive proof against them, yet the circumstances were so strong that it appeared proper to put them to the test of one of these collateral oaths. They were all willing, and two of them swore. When it came to the turn of the third he could not persuade his relations to join with him, and he was accordingly brought in for the whole amount of the goods stolen, and penalties annexed. These customs bear a strong resemblance to the rules of proof established among our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons, who were likewise obliged, in the case of oaths taken for the purpose of exculpation, to produce a certain number of compurgators; but, as these might be any indifferent persons, who would take upon them to bear testimony to the truth of what their neighbour swore, from an opinion of his veracity, there seems to be more refinement and more knowledge of human nature in the Sumatran practice. The idea of devoting to destruction, by a wilful perjury, not himself only, but all, even the remotest branches, of a family which constitutes his greatest pride, and of which the deceased heads are regarded with the veneration that was paid to the dii lares of the ancients, has doubtless restrained many a man from taking a false oath, who without much compunction would suffer thirty or a hundred compurgators of the former description to take their chance of that fate. Their strongest prejudices are here converted to the most beneficial purposes. CEREMONY OF TAKING AN OATH.