The inland people of that country are said to pay a kind of adoration to the sea, and to make to it an offering of cakes and sweetmeats on their beholding it for the first time, deprecating its power of doing them mischief.  This is by no means surprising when we consider the natural proneness of unenlightened mankind to regard with superstitious awe whatever has the power of injuring them without control, and particularly when it is attended with any circumstances mysterious and inexplicable to their understandings.  The sea possesses all these qualities.  Its destructive and irresistible power is often felt, and especially on the coasts of India where tremendous surfs are constantly breaking on the shore, rising often to their greatest degree of violence without any apparent external cause.  Add to this the flux and reflux and perpetual ordinary motion of that element, wonderful even to philosophers who are acquainted with the cause, unaccountable to ignorant men, though long accustomed to the effects; but to those who only once or twice in their lives have been eyewitnesses to the phenomena, supernatural and divine.  It must not however be understood that anything like a regular worship is paid to the sea by these people, any more than we should conclude that people in England worship witches when they nail a horseshoe on the threshold to prevent their approach, or break the bottoms of eggshells to hinder them from sailing in them.  It is with the inhabitants of Lampong no more than a temporary sentiment of fear and respect, which a little familiarity soon effaces.  Many of them indeed imagine it endowed with a principle of voluntary motion.  They tell a story of an ignorant fellow who, observing with astonishment its continual agitation, carried a vessel of sea water with him, on his return to the country, and poured it into a lake, in full expectation of seeing it perform the same fanciful motions he had admired it for in its native bed.*

(Footnote.  The manners of the natives of the Philippine or Luzon Islands correspond in so many striking particulars with those of the inland Sumatrans, and especially where they differ most from the Malays, that I think no doubt can be entertained, if not of a sameness of origin, at least of an intercourse and connection in former times which now no longer exists.  The following instances are taken from an essay preserved by Thevenot, entitled Relation des Philippines par un religieux; traduite d’un manuscrit Espagnol du cabinet de Monsieur Dom.  Carlo del Pezzo (without date), and from a manuscript communicated to me by Alex Dalrymple, Esquire.  “The chief Deity of the Tagalas is called Bathala mei Capal, and also Diuata; and their principal idolatry consists in adoring those of their ancestors who signalised themselves for courage or abilities, calling them Humalagar, i.e. manes:  They make slaves of the people who do not keep silence at the tombs of their ancestors.  They have great veneration for the crocodile, which