Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 3.djvu/88

 76 LAWS, details conceraing them. This may be done under the four following heads : — viz. History and Ar- rangement of the Laws, — Forms of Judicatory, — Civil Laws, and Penal Laws. As in other departments, so in that of the laws, the Hindus, the Arabs, or both, have imparted a share of their learning to the Indian islanders. (The laws of all the civilized tribes consist, accord- ingly, of a commixture of native customs and of Hindu and Mahomedan jurisprudence. From the remarkable opposition which exists in the state o society among the Indian islanders, and that of the Hindus and Arabs, we must be prepared to find that the peculiar codes of the two latter people would be but very partially adopted by the former, — that laws framed for a populous country, in which the odious institution of the castes was rigidly es- tablished, or for the shepherds of the add and sterile plains of Arabia, could not be transferred, without modification, to the simple, rude, and scanty population of the verdant and luxuriant islands of the equator. The reigning religion of the Archipelago, as has been fully described in another department of this work, is the Mahomedan, which necessarily implies the inseparable existence of the Mahomedan law. In a period of about two centuries and a half, which elapsed from the end of the thirteenth to the be- ginning of the sixteenth century, almost all the