and feed on snakes, monkeys, or anything else
they can kill with their blow-pipes; if the chief
wants food, if he wants meat that is, and cannot
get it by these means, one of his followers is
killed and cooked; which not only solaces the
hungry stomach of the great man, but gives
him a head into the bargain. They commence
the attack on the doomed village by throwing
lighted fire-balls on the thatch of the huts,
which immediately involve the whole in flames;
they then raise the war cry, and the work of
murder begins. Not a man is spared; each as
he descends the ladder of his dwelling to escape
from the flames, "which give just light enough
to distinguish a man from a woman," is speared
or cut down with the cutlass; the women and
children are seized as they endeavour to escape;
the great object being to prevent information
finding its way to the other villages, so that
there shall be no possible warning of the misery
and slaughter at hand. In this manner the
raid continues; and the victorious chief
returns with his boat-load of heads, women and
children—the latter for slaves.

Many delicious fruits and beautiful flowers,
as well as forest trees and spice trees, grow in
these Indian islands. Of the fruits the mangostin
is the best, according to European notions;
though, to the native, the durian is the one
incomparable. It is a little odd that the same
genus of tree, the garcinia, which produces
this most exquisite fruit, produces also one of the
most drastic and acrid of substances. Gamboja,
a corruption of the Malay name of the chief
country which produces it—Kamboja—is the
yellow inspissated sap of the young gamboge
tree, obtained by wounding the bark; and it
seems to be one of those strange bits of
compensation found throughout all nature, that the
mangostin fruit and the drastic juice gamboge,
should be of the same genus. The mango is
also an Archipelagian fruit, the varieties of
which differ as widely as pears and apples here
in England. Then there is the pomegranate,
which, however, is an exotic, and which bears
the same name as the ruby; but the fruit is so
poor that it ought to come under the head
of flowers. The guava is another fruit, which
we care for more as a preserve than when freshly
gathered, but which the natives prize highly;
they class it with the jambu, calling one kind
the seedy jambu, another the Chinese jambu,
and so on. Limes, sweet limes, and
shaddocks or pumplenooses grow in abundance
through the islands. Oranges—the sweet orange
proper—are generally inferior to those of the
Azores, the south of Europe, and the north
of India; but there is a sweet orange with a
green thick skin adhering closely to the pulp,
that is very delicious; and the mandarin orange,
which attains perfection only at some three
thousand feet above the sea level, is of first-rate
quality. The shaddock—the tiger or Batavian
orange—when carefully cultivated, is far
superior to any grown elsewhere. Coco palms
abound; and of the bread-fruit, the artocarpus
or jack-fruit, there are three kinds, all good.

There are plenty of fancy woods in the
Archipelago. Sandal wood; ebony or "char-
wood;" satin wood; the petrospermum Indicum,
which gives those beautiful little blocks known
as Amboyna or Kyabucca wood; the speckled
woods of the wood palm—these are the best
known and the most used in Europe. The
palm family is, as always, one of the most
useful of the whole forest. First in importance
comes the coco palm, and then the
gomuti, or brassus gomuti, which does a great
many things. In the first place its sap gives
sugar and an intoxicating beverage; then,
between the trunk and the fronds are found, first,
a black horse-hair like substance, which makes
the best cordage of the western islands of
the Archipelago; second, a fine cottony
substance which makes the best tinder, and
which is exported for tinder; and, third,
"strong stiff spines from which are made the
pens of all the nations that write on paper,
with the arrows of the blow-pipe of the rude
tribes that still use this weapon." The pith
gives an inferior kind of sago. The seeds have
been made into a confection. Their pulpy
envelope abounds in a poisonous juice—a strong
infusion of which is used in the wars. The
Dutch call the juice "hell-water." There
are other kinds of palms beside this and the
coco palm; but there is not space for a
full description of them within our present
limits.

There are plenty of spice trees in the
Archipelago—nutmegs and camphor trees, clove trees,
&c.; while rice, tobacco, and the sugar cane,
safflower for a dye, capsicums, ginger, the
coffee plant, and the cacao or theobroma,
bananas and batatas, yams, maize, the gluga or
paper mulberry tree, the abaca or textile
banana, and the piña or pineapple leaf for
grass cloths, cassia, cinnamon and pepper, are
just a few of the gifts and graces of these
favoured islands. There are metals too, richly
if partially distributed; but only four—iron,
tin, copper, and gold; there are diamonds and
coal fields (coal is "earth charcoal" in Javanese);
there are sweet-scented gums like benzoin,
and magic stones like the bezoar; there is
ambergris from the sperm whale, and civet from
the viverra; there are birds of paradise, or
bird of the gods, as the native name goes;
magnificent fowls, pigeons, parrots, peacocks,
but they are all dispersed in different localities.
For the Asiatic Archipelago makes a wide
tract altogether, and climate, customs, productions
and races vary, as must necessarily be
the case in so large an extent of land, made
larger yet in range by the intervening tracts of
ocean.

There seem to be about five races of man in
the Archipelago—the Malays proper, the
Sâmang or dwarf negroes of the Malay Peninsula,
the Negritos or Aetas of the Philippines, the
large negroes or Papuas of New Guinea, and a
race intermediate between these last and the
Malayan, called by Crawfurd the Negro-Malay.
The Malays proper are of course the superior