The ideas of geography among such of them as do not frequent the sea are perfectly confined, or rather they entertain none.  Few of them know that the country they inhabit is an island, or have any general name for it.  Habit renders them expert in travelling through the woods, where they perform journeys of weeks and months without seeing a dwelling.  In places little frequented, where they have occasion to strike out new paths (for roads there are none), they make marks on trees for the future guidance of themselves and others.  I have heard a man say, “I will attempt a passage by such a route, for my father, when living, told me that he had left his tokens there.”  They estimate the distance of places from each other by the number of days, or the proportion of the day, taken up in travelling it, and not by measurement of the space.  Their journey, or day’s walk, may be computed at about twenty miles; but they can bear a long continuance of fatigue.

ASTRONOMY.

The Malays as well as the Arabs and other Mahometan nations fix the length of the year at three hundred and fifty-four days, or twelve lunar months of twenty-nine days and a half; by which mode of reckoning each year is thrown back about eleven days.  The original Sumatrans rudely estimate their annual periods from the revolution of the seasons, and count their years from the number of their crops of grain (taun padi); a practice which, though not pretending to accuracy, is much more useful for the general purposes of life than the lunar period, which is merely adapted to religious observances.  They as well as the Malays compute time by lunations, but do not attempt to trace any relation or correspondence between these smaller measures and the solar revolution.  Whilst more polished nations were multiplying mistakes and difficulties in their endeavours to ascertain the completion of the sun’s course through the ecliptic, and in the meanwhile suffering their nominal seasons to become almost the reverse of nature, these people, without an idea of intercalation, preserved in a rude way the account of their years free from essential, or at least progressive, error and the confusion which attends it.  The division of the month into weeks I believe to be unknown except where it has been taught with Mahometanism; the day of the moon’s age being used instead of it where accuracy is required; nor do they subdivide the day into hours.  To denote the time of day at which any circumstance they find it necessary to speak of happened, they point with their finger to the height in the sky at which the sun then stood.  And this mode is the more general and precise as the sun, so near the equator, ascends and descends almost perpendicularly, and rises and sets at all seasons of the year within a few minutes of six o’clock.  Scarcely any of the stars or constellations are distinguished by them.  They notice however the planet Venus, but do not imagine her to be the same at the different periods of her