Pagan races of the Malay Peninsula - Sabrizain.org

400
DECORATIVE ART
development which is entirely foreign to the cast of mind
even of the Malays, who are a race some centuries
ahead of the Semang in general intelligence.'
Vaughan - Stevens, however, not content with
applying this theory to the combs, attempted to carry
it even further and extend it to all other patterns
executed by the Semang, such as the patterns on
their blowpipes, their quivers, and their magic tubes.
This extension, however, is regarded, even by
Vaughan-Stevens' own editors, as utterly untenable,
so that we need not trouble to waste any more time
in following him further away from the track.
It is, unfortunately, necessary to speak thus plainly,
in order to prevent the published work of Vaughan-
Stevens from entrapping scholars who use it, and who
may not have had the right kind of field experience to
enable them to use it critically. But it is a far more
congenial and grateful task for the writer—knowing, as
he does, the all but insuperable difficulties of the subject
—to record the fact that, setting apart all question of
this absurd pseudo-botanical theory, that indefatigable
pioneer (Vaughan-Stevens) has left behind him, not
only a fine collection of specimens of Negrito art (now
in the Museum of Ethnology at Berlin), but also a vast
mass of most valuable observations which only require
critical revision and recension to render them a verit-
able storehouse of fresh and remarkable information
for the ethnologist. From this point of view, the
1 For other scarcely less grotesque the three concentric ring- lines which
and far - fetched ideas of Vaughan- separate the panels in a pattern repre-
Slevens, see Vaughan - Stevens, iii. sent three kinds 136, and similar references, where
we are told that the hollow of
of lightning employed
by Kari — the straight flash, the
forked flash, and the '^ heavy blue
a bamboo internode (used as a tropic lightning flash," only the
quiver) represents a mountain -with middle one of which is supposed to
caves in the interior, and that be effective !