This part of the island is in a low state of population, but it is an error to ascribe this to the mode of obtaining wives by purchase. The circumstance of children constituting part of the property of the parents proves a most powerful incentive to matrimony, and there is not perhaps any country on the face of the earth where marriage is more general than here, instances of persons of either sex passing their lives in a state of celibacy being extremely rare. The necessity of purchasing does not prove such an obstacle to matrimony as is supposed. Was it indeed true that every man was obliged to remain single till he had accumulated, from the produce of his pepper-garden, a sum adequate to the purchase of a wife, married pairs would truly be scarce. But the people have other resources; there are few families who are not in possession of some small substance; they breed goats and buffaloes, and in general keep in reserve some small sum for particular purposes. The purchase-money of the daughter serves also to provide wives for the sons. Certain it is that the fathers are rarely at a loss for money to procure them wives so soon as they become marriageable. In the districts under my charge are about eight thousand inhabitants, among whom I do not conceive it would be possible to find ten instances of men of the age of thirty years unmarried. We must then seek for other causes of the paucity of inhabitants, and indeed they are sufficiently obvious; among these we may reckon that the women are by nature unprolific, and cease gestation at an early age; that, almost totally unskilled in the medical art, numbers fall victims to the endemic diseases of a climate nearly as fatal to its indigenous inhabitants as to the strangers who settle among them: to which we may add that the indolence and inactivity of the natives tend to relax and enervate the bodily frame, and to abridge the natural period of their lives. ... MODES OF MARRIAGE.