NATIVE LIFE IN BRITISH BORNEO. 251 



in my fields +, niay a crocodile swallow me +:. may the eggs never 

 be hatched in my fowl-house + , may I never catch a fish when I 

 go fishing +, may my life be ended +. I cut this stick + as if I 

 was chopping my own head off +. The Great Spirit is my wit- 

 ness +. May this stick grow into life again + if I ever kill or 

 take any more heads -\-, and I follow all the customs of the British 

 North Borneo Company -f, and I take this oath with a sincere 

 heart +, and I shall pay the poll-tax of the company +." 



One of the Murut chiefs " was chopping away at the stick, re- 

 peating the oath in a loud voice, when he came to the part ' may 

 my wife die ' (if ever I take another head), when he stopped short 

 and exclaimed with a grim smile : * I have no wife ; you Peluans 

 cut off her head long ago'; and the Peluans gave a shout of 

 laughter in which he joined, the crowd around rolling on the 

 grass, convulsed with merriment. This would denote that the re- 

 taliation in taking heads does not proceed from a spirit of affec- 

 tion for the departed relatives, but rather from a sense of revenge 

 or vendetta, engendered by a feeling that shame has been cast 

 upon the tribe by losing one of the family at the hands of the 

 enemy. Another illustration of the indifference with which the 

 people regard the head-hunting custom was afforded at a chief's 

 house where fifty-two human heads and pieces of human bones 

 were hanging from the rafters. The skin of some of the faces was 

 so well preserved that the expression could still be recognized." 

 Mr. Daly explained that he could not eat his evening meal in a 

 room where these were suspended, and asked that they be cut 

 down. This request the chief and his sons " cheerfully complied 

 with, but with a bland smile of patronizing pity at the white 

 man's amiable squeamishness ; and so to humor me they took 

 down the ghastly trophies, and, huddling them together in rattan 

 baskets, put them away at the back of the house ; doubtless they 

 were reinstated as drawing-room ornaments after my departure." 



It is claimed that great improvement in the order and civiliza- 

 tion of the country, and in personal security, has already resulted 

 from the occupation by the British North Borneo Company. 



The higher scientific deductions, which could not have been reached without 

 the aid of a faculty in which imagination had a share, are in standing contradic- 

 tion to the often-repeated dictum that science is void of imagination and the play 

 of thought. Newton, Kepler, Bacon, Helmholtz, Lyell, Owen, Darwin, and Pas- 

 teur, are cited by a writer in "The Lancet" as scientific investigators repre- 

 senting the very highest type of intellect, in which the insight and imagination of 

 the poet were united with the capacity for severe and sustained observation. To 

 represent scientific study as affording no play for emotion is false. " No poet's 

 fancy can equal in grandeur the two twin generalizations of science, gravitation 

 and evolution — the one binding together the universe of matter, the other uniting 

 into a harmonious whole the universe of life." 



