Pagan races of the Malay Peninsula - Sabrizain.org

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WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS
discovered the ready-made blowpipe of bamboo would
ever again have resorted to the method of boring its
tube out of wood, or to the perhaps still clumsier
process of uniting a couple of wooden half-cylinders,
which when fitted together do duty as a tube.
Speaking generally, it appears on the whole
most reasonable to suppose that the blowpipe was
introduced into the Malay Peninsula by the Sakai,
upon their first advent into that region, that it has
since been perfected by the same race, and that the
modern blowpipe of the Malayan tribes in the Penin-
sula (as well as that of the Archipelago) was either
an inferior imitation of the Sakai weapon, or else that
the wooden blowpipe was an altogether independent
invention, which appears at the best most improbable.
The only point in which the Bornean blowpipe is
in any way an improvement on that of the Sakai is in
its possession of a " sight," which the Sakai blow-
pipes are, I believe, universally without. Yet even a
rifled blowpipe has been recorded from Perak,^ and
although the statement is unsupported, in all other im-
portant respects—in the labour required for its construc-
tion, in the important matter of weight, and in finish
—the Bornean weapon is certainly inferior, not only
to the Sakai blowpipe, but even to that of the Semang.
The exact distribution of the various types of
blowpipe in the Malay Peninsula yet remains to be
worked out. Some information on this point is, how-
ever, already forthcoming. The most highly devel-
oped (and decorated) type of blowpipe is, as has
already been said, found among the central Sakai
1 See De Quatrefages, p. 231 («(7/f). "choke-bore" blowpipe, such as is
This must be a mistake of M. Lias. found among the Besisi (v. p. 308,
I believe what he saw was a infra).
I