ETHNOLOGICAL SURVEY 23 



sians, to whom the former also consigns the Kayans and 

 the Punans.* Doctors Hose and McDougall, who in their 

 Pagan Tribes of Borneo have contributed much to the 

 ethnology of the island, have convincingly shown that 

 the Ibans (Sea Dayaks) are recent immigrants, probably 

 of only two hundred years ago, from Sumatra, and are 

 Proto-Malays. They hold the view that the Kayans 

 have imparted to the Kenyahs and other tribes the ''prin- 

 cipal elements of the peculiar culture which they now 

 have in common." 



The Malays undoubtedly were the first to employ 

 the word Dayak as a designation for the native tribes 

 except the nomadic, and in this they have been followed 

 by both the Dutch and the British. The word, which 

 makes its appearance in the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century, is derived from a Sarawak word, dayah, man, 

 and is therefore, as Ling Roth says, a generic term for 

 man. The tribes do not call themselves Dayaks, and to 

 use the designation as an anthropological descriptive is an 

 inadmissible generalisation. Nevertheless, in the general 

 conception the word has come to mean all the natives of 

 Borneo except the Malays and the nomadic peoples, in 

 the same way as American Indian stands for the multi- 

 tude of tribes distributed over a continent. In this 

 sense, for the sake of convenience, I shall myself use the 

 word, but to apply it indiscriminately to anthropological 

 matters is as unsatisfactory as if one should describe a 

 certain tribe in the new world merely as American Indian. 



* Quoted from Pagan Tribes in Borneo, II, p. 316 



