Pagan races of the Malay Peninsula - Sabrizain.org

12 INTRODUCTION
leaf, young shoot, bud (not to mention ferns and fungi) that comes
their way, but even make use of plants that are highly poisonous,
until they have been treated, such as the fruit of the " perah "-tree,
which is poisonous unless cooked, and some of the wild yams, which
they eat after washing out the poison. Of the number of edible fruits
in the jungle, the lists of their names given in the text will give
some faint idea, though even these lists must not be taken as in any
sense complete, and if they should (to take a very rare contingency)
be in any manner of doubt as to the edibility of any particular fruit,
the birds and the monkeys will be their guide. Even the despised
mangrove swamp, regarded by Europeans as the ne plus ultra of
all impenetrable and unproductive forms of vegetation, contributes
its quota of edible fruits, such, for instance, as the " pisang-pisang "
and " berembang," of both of which I myself have eaten. Water
is obtained by tapping the " kait-kait " and other wild creepers, and
from the stems of certain large bamboos, which not infrequently hold
water in their hollow internodes. But the most important plants
and trees, from an ethnological point of view, are undoubtedly (after
mere food-producers), the upas tree, the upas creeper, the tuba or
fish-poison creeper, and a species of bamboo called Bambusa Wrayi.
Of these it will be sufficient to remark (since they have been treated
very fully in the text) that the first three are the main ingredients of
the famous dart-poison of the aborigines, which, like the wourali
poison of the South American Indians, is in some of its compounds,
at all events, almost immediately fatal, whether to man, bird, or
beast. The fish-poison (so called because it was formerly much
used for poisoning the small streams in the Peninsula and thereby
stupefying the fish) is used in combination with both of the other
two main ingredients of the dart-poison, whether tree or creeper.
And the last of the category, Bambusa Wrayi or longinodis, is an
extremely rare bamboo, which has exceedingly slender internodes
that grow to quite six feet in length, and which, though only known
to grow on two or three mountains in the Peninsula, has been never-
theless singled out by the aborigines to serve in the production of
their jointless blowpipe.
In the foregoing pages we have glanced at that inexhaustible
(and after all indescribable) profusion of nature by which the
ancestors of these races found themselves surrounded in that dim
and unrecorded past, when first their toilsome wanderings, prolonged
through generations, brought them face to face within the narrow
confines of the Malay Peninsula. At whatever period this was, and
in whatever order they may have arrived, we can now recognise with
sufficient clearness the Semang, Sakai, and Jakun as three distinct
and separate races ; the Negritos or Semang, with their woolly hair
and round bright eyes, the darkest, the best-developed, and at the
same time the most markedly nomadic of all the races in the