VII.] THE OCEANIC MONGOLS. 241 



collective designations mostly unknown to the tribes themselves, 

 all stand very near the lowest rung of the social ladder, practising 

 various forms of self-mutilation, distending the 

 ear-lobes often down to the shoulders 1 , plucking customs, 

 out the eyebrows, filing or perforating the teeth, 

 exposing the dead on trees or platforms, or smoking them 

 dry, or else burying and then disinterring the bones to be pre- 

 served near the haunts of the living. Head-hunting has always 

 been a standing institution, introduced with the first Malayan 

 arrivals from the mainland, and most houses of the forest and 

 up-river Dyaks are adorned with the ghastly trophies furnished by 

 the victims of this immemorial custom. Cannibalism, also, and 

 human sacrifices to the ancestral shades are far more common 

 than is generally supposed. Mr Bock describes and figures a 

 "priestess." who informed him that the palms, the knees, and 

 brains "are considered the best eating." He also visited a 

 cannibal chief of the comparatively settled Tring district, "an 

 utter incarnation of all that is most repulsive and horrible in the 

 human form," who " had fresh upon his head the blood of no less 

 than seventy victims, men, women, and children, whom he and his 

 followers had just slaughtered, and whose hands and brains he had 

 eaten 2 ." 



"Surmungup," as the custom of human sacrifice is called, 

 must have formerly ranged over most of the island, 

 for it has ceased to be practised even amongst the sacrifices. 

 Dusuns only since the British occupation of the 

 northern districts. The ostensible reason seems to have been to 

 send messages to dead relatives, and to this end a slave was 

 procured, tied up, and bound round with cloths, and then " after 

 some preliminary dancing and singing, one after another they 

 would stick a spear a little way an inch or so into his body, 

 each one sending a message to his deceased friend as he did so 3 ." 



1 "The lobes of the ears were pierced sometimes in no less than three 

 places, in addition to the large central slit, the principal holes being enor- 

 mously enlarged by the weighty tin rings hanging in them " (Carl Bock, 

 Headhunters of Borneo, p. 133). 



2 Ibid. pp. 134-5. 



3 W. B. Pryer, Jour. Anthi-op. Inst. 1886, p. 234. Elsewhere the victim 

 K. l6 



