In the Ntcobar Islands. 67 



angles to each other, to produce a grain on the finished cloth. In a recent communi- 

 cation Mr. Wray writes me that these mallets employed \>y the Semang of Perak to 

 beat out the bark and give it the grain (which it retains even after considerable wear) 

 are made of hard palm-wood. They are bat-shaped, with cj^lindrical handles, and 

 have one surface of the blade of the bat scored with lines at right angles to each other, 

 which leave projecting squares about a quarter of an inch across, divided by V-shaped 

 grooves of the same width." [I, p. 381.] 



"The methods used bj- the Blandas of Kuala Langat for manufadluring their 

 bark-cloth are similar to those of the Sakai, the bark of the Arfocarpiis being detached 

 and pounded in the same wslJ. An interesting development of the wooden mallet 

 used for pounding the cloth is, however, to be found among the Blandas, this mallet 

 being furnished with transverse ridges or teeth ci;t into its under surface. These 

 teeth facilitate the process of separating the fibres, and render the material softer and 

 more flexible. As a rule the bark-cloth of the Blandas is quite undecorated, though 

 when made from the bark of the Artocarpus it is stained by the sap of the tree to a 

 sort of deep reddish tinge." [I, p. 389.] 



In the old days when some ethnologists spoke of the Pol3'nesians as "Mala3-c- 

 Polynesians" one of the props of this theory of relationship was the similar bark-cloth 

 made b}' the Malays and their supposed derivatives. For this reason I have gone 

 more fiill}' into the process used on the Malay Peninsula than I should otherwise have 

 done, as bark-cloth seems an almost universal product of tropical peoples, and surely 

 there is no close connedlion with the true Polynesian kapa-making, but the whole 

 work reminds one more of the making or rather stripping the lace-bark of Jamaica, 

 and no one has suggested a strain of Malay blood in the West Indians. 



In the Nicobar Islands a rough cloth is made from the inner bark of a fig 

 {^Fiais brei'icuspis^ by the Shorn Pen, a primitive Malay stock in the interior of Great 

 Nicobar. Sheets of this bark-cloth are used as pillows and bed coverings, and among 

 the hostile aborigines, it is said the women wear short petticoats of the material while 

 the men go naked. ^^ The Shom Pen brought several rolls of bark-cloth in pieces 

 about 4 by 6 feet. {^Ibid., p. 146.)" In common with the Andamanese (who are 

 Negritos), clothing is of small account, and they were never impelled to beat the bark 

 of trees to cover their nakedness. 



Beyond the Indian Ocean the making of bark-cloth has passed to the great 

 African Lsland Madagascar, and as a strain of the "Malayo-Polynesian" race has here 



^'Kloss, C. Boden. — In Ihe Andamans and Nicobars. London, 1903, p. 219. 



''I have several specimens of the Shom'Pen cloth made from the bark of Celtis (species unknown), a tree of the 

 elm family ( t/riicacet^e); all are of the same brown color, and seem fairly strong; they were collected by E. H. Man, 

 F. E. Tuson, in 1889, and Major R. C. Temple in 1895; all were sent to me by Prof. H. Balfour of Oxford. 



