MALAY LITERATURE. 379 



flowers in order to preserve the abnormity. Concerning this last 

 my correspondent said that it is all the same whether the seed is 

 taken from the capsules of monstrous flowers or from the whole 

 spike. Seed taken in this way will give from twenty-five to thirty- 

 five per cent of the monstrous flowers, but the ratio varies from 

 year to year. 



There are some advantages to the floriculturist in the monstrous 

 form as the first bloom in it is uppermost and very conspicuous, 

 while in the normal form the blooms appear from below upward, 

 and the drooping tip of the spike is the last to produce flowers. The 

 case in hand is a remarkable deviation from the type in many ways, 

 but most interesting of all is the fact that floriculturists have by 

 selection developed a variety that, in a packet of a hundred seeds, 

 is quite certain to give some plants of the type " monstrosa," which 

 it bears as its trade name. 



MALAY LITERATURE. 



BY R. CLYDE FOKD. 



Malay has a literature peculiarly his own, and in it comes to 

 light all that subtle appreciation of Nature which marks him as 

 a Naturmensch, but not a savage. This lore of his race he carries 

 mostly in his memory, for to reduce it to writing has been, until 

 recently, a task at once laborious and scholarly, and the ordinary 

 Malay, living in the ease of perpetual summer, is neither. Still, there 

 are dog-eared old manuscripts which circulate from one village or 

 campong to another, and these are often read aloud in the evenings 

 to eager companies. And it makes a scene never to be forgotten, 

 to see a dozen people seated in the shadows around some old man 

 and to listen to the mellow cadences of his voice as he reads to them 

 a tale of the olden time, of the great days of his race, before the 

 foreigner's ships had scared the fish from the bays or turned them 

 into noisy harbors ; the sparkling stars peep through the ragged, whis- 

 pering fronds of the palm trees, the yellow light of the damar torch 

 shines on eager faces, crickets chirp in the grass, and from afar comes 

 the booming of the sea borne on the soft breath of the night wind. 

 Malay literature, like most literatures, has had an ancient and a 

 modern period. In the former we behold a primitive people domi- 

 nated by Sanskrit life and civilization, and naturally enough the 

 literature of this time is mostly translations of Sanskrit poems and 

 romances, or at least productions inspired by such, and full of allu- 

 sions to Hindu mythology. Probably to this early time may be 



