1770 MALAYS 407 
The language spoken among them is entirely Malay, or at 
least so called, for I believe it is a most corrupt dialect. 
Notwithstanding that Java has two or three languages, and 
almost every little island besides its own, distinct from the 
test, yet none use, or I believe remember, their own language, 
so that this Lingua Franca Malay is the only one spoken in 
this neighbourhood, and, I have been told, over a very large 
part of the East Indies. 
Their women, and in imitation of them the Dutch also, 
wear as much hair as ever they can nurse up on their heads, 
which by the use of oils, etc., is incredibly great. It is 
universally black, and they wear it in a kind of circular 
wreath upon the tops of their heads, fastened with a 
bodkin, in a taste inexpressibly elegant. I have often wished 
that one of our ladies could see a Malay woman’s head 
dressed in this manner, with her wreath of flowers, commonly 
Arabian jasmine, round that of hair; for in that method of 
dress there is certainly an elegant simplicity and unaffected 
show of the beauties of nature incomparably superior to any- 
thing I have seen in the laboured head-dresses of my fair 
country-women. Both sexes bathe themselves in the river 
constantly at least once a day, a most necessary custom 
in hot climates. Their teeth also, disgustful as they must 
appear to a European from their blackness, occasioned by 
their continued chewing of betel, are a great object of 
attention: every one must have them filed into the 
fashionable form, which is done with whetstones by a most 
troublesome and painful operation. First, both the upper 
and under teeth are rubbed till they are perfectly even and 
quite blunt,so that the two jaws lose not less than half a 
line each in the operation. Then a deep groove is made in 
the middle of the upper teeth, crossing them all, and itself 
cutting through at least one-fourth of the whole thickness of 
the teeth, so that the enamel is cut quite through, a fact 
which we Europeans, who are taught by our dentifricators 
that any damage done to the enamel is mortal to the tooth, 
find it difficult to believe. Yet among these people, where 
this custom is universal, I have scarce seen even in old people 
