the custom of the
Ammonites, who made their children pass through the fire to Moloch,
during which they caused certain tabrets or drums to sound, whence the
place was called _Tophet_, signifying a tabret. There is one sect among
the Hindoos, called _Parsees_, who neither burn nor inter their dead.
They surround certain pieces of ground with high walls, remote from
houses or public roads, and there deposit their dead, wrapped in sheets,
which thus have no other tombs but the maws of ravenous fowls.[240]

[Footnote 240: These Parsees, called _Parcees_ in the Pilgrims, and
Guebres by other writers, are a remnant of the ancient Persians, who are
fire-worshippers, or followers of Zerdust, the Zoroaster of the
Greeks.--E.]

The Hindoos are, generally speaking, an industrious race; being either
cultivators of the ground, or otherwise diligently employed in various
occupations. Among them there are many curious artificers, who are the
best imitators in the world, as they will make any thing new very
exactly after a pattern. The Mahometans, on the contrary, are generally
idle, being _all for to morrow_, a common saying among them, and live by
the labours of the Hindoos. Some of these poor deluded idolaters will
eat of nothing which has had life, feeding on grain, herbs, milk,
butter, cheese, and sweet-meats, of which last they have various kinds,
the best and most wholesome of which is green ginger remarkably well
preserved. Some tribes eat fish, and of no other living thing. The
Rajaput tribe eat swine's flesh, which is held in abomination by the
Mahometans. Some will eat of one kind of flesh, and some of another; but
all the Hindoos universally abstain from beef owing to the reverence
they entertain for cows; and therefore give large sums yearly to the
Mogul, besides his other exactions, as a ransom for the lives of these
sacred animals. Whence, though they have other and good provisions in
abundance, we meet with very little meat in that country.

The most tender-hearted among the idolaters are called _Banians,_ who
hold the _metempsychosis_ of Pythagoras as a prime article of their
faith, believing that the souls of the best men and women, when freed
from the prison of their human bodies, transmigrate into the bodies of
cows, which they consider as the best of all creatures. They hold that
the souls of the wicked go into the bodies of viler beasts; as the souls
of gluttons into swine, those of the voluptuous and incontinen