OF DYAKS. 179 



plain, taking great care to keep them highly polished, 

 One would think that the necessary weight of so much 

 brass would be an inconvenient and cumbrous burden, 

 but habit, and the taste for finery, soon reconcile this 

 people to the load, and having been inured to it from 

 their earliest infancy, they do not feel it so much as 

 strangers would necessarily do. Large rings of this 

 wire also adorn the legs of the young men from 

 immediately below the knee to the middle of the calf 

 of the leg, and on their necks strings of the teeth of 

 their enemies, and of bears, panthers, and other wild 

 animals, are their favourite ornaments. 



In peace, their head-dress is a handkerchief, or a piece 

 of the inner bark of a tree, dyed of a bright yellow, and 

 is so disposed that its ends stand up from the forehead ; 

 their hair is cut in such a manner as to give to their 

 features the most savage-looking appearance, being 

 shaved from that part of the head near the temples in 

 an arched form, so that the ends of the two arches 

 meet in the middle of the forehead in a fine point : 

 the hair is cut short in front, but left long and flowing 

 behind. In war, they wear jackets of a thicker texture, 

 which are also padded with cotton to such a thickness 

 as to enable them to resist the blow from the point of 

 a wooden spear. Their head-dress on these occa- 

 sions is a kind of fillet, about two inches broad, made 

 of red cloth ornamented with very small white cowrie 

 shells, or beads, worked into different patterns ; from 

 these fillets rise feathers of different kinds of birds, but 



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