346 REV. GEORGE A. SHAW, F.Z.S., ON 
was brought to them. All travellers with whom I have had 
the opportunity of speaking are forcibly impressed with the 
way the children seem to swarm in the Taimoro villages. 
The people have intermarried very little with other tribes, 
and each branch of the tribe has kept itself, to a very gre eat 
extent, distinct. This, together with the clannish, almost 
superstitious, reverence for their ancestors and their writings, 
has kept from the Taimoro many of those evils which have 
seriously affected the growth of ‘population i in other tribes. 
The writings just referred to are unique in Madagascar. 
Called by the people the Séra-be (or “ Great writings’ Sy they 
constitute, as far as we know, the only books used in the 
island until Christianity was introduced by the English 
missionaries. ‘These writings are said to have been brought 
from Mecca by their ancestors (in the canoe already referred 
to), who carefully preserved them and handed them down 
to their children, with the power to read them. ‘This 
accomplishment is now, whatever it may have been in the 
early settlement of these people in Madagascar, simply 
mstruction in the Arabic characters, and the mode of 
forming the characters into words. None of them have 
now the power of accurately translating or understanding 
what they read, although many of the passages are committed 
to memory, and are used on certain occasions as incantations 
or prayers to God and Mohammed, I have known Taimoro 
men travel several days’ journey, upon hearing of the location 
of an Arab trader, so as to secure a translation of a passage 
in some of their books, in order to add to their own import- 
ance by an exhibition to their neighbours of their superior 
knowledge. 
A superstitious sacredness is attached to the writing itself, 
and passages from it are copied on to small pieces of native 
paper and worn as amulets round the neck. Nearly every 
child in the tribe has one of these small charms attached to a 
string round its neck, and carefully preserved from wet or 
injury by being wrapped in bark and thickly plastered with 
wax, till it looks something like the long agate beads affected 
so much by the women of the coast tribes. 
The one great desire of all Malagasy women is to become 
mothers. If. any woman of the Taimoro fears that she is 
hkely to be an exception to the general rule—for the 
majority have large families—she has recourse to one of the 
scribes and diviners, or priests, as they call them. A portion 
of the sacred writing is copied upon a piece of white paper 
