102 BRITISH BORNEO. 
tan of Brunai gravely assured me that there was such a tribe, 
and that the individuals composing it were in the habit of 
carrying about chairs with them, in the seat of each of which 
there was a little hole, in which the lady or gentleman care- 
fully inserted her or his tail before settling down to a com- 
fortable chat. This belief in the existence of a tailed race ap- 
pears to be widespread, and in his “ Pioneering in New Gui- 
nea” Mr. CHALMERS gives an amusing account of a de- 
tailed description of such a tribe by a man who vowed he had 
lived with them, and related how they were provided with 
long sticks, with which to make holes in the ground before 
squatting down, for the reception of their short stumpy tails! 
I think it is Mr. H. F. ROMILLy who, in his interesting little 
work on the Western Pacific and New Guinea, accounts for 
the prevalence of “ yarns” of this class by explaining that 
the natives regard Europeans as being vastly superior to them 
in general knowledge and, when they find them asking such 
questions as, for instance, whether there are tailed-people in 
the interior, jump to the conclusion that the white men must 
have good grounds for believing that they do exist, and then 
they gradually come to believe in their existence themselves. 
There is, however, I think, some excuse for the Brunai peo- 
ple’s belief, for I have seen one tribe of Muruts who, in addi- 
tion to the usual small loin cloth, wear on their backs only a 
skin of a long-tailed monkey, the tail of which hangs down be- 
hind in such a manner as, when the men are a little distance 
off, to give one at first glance the impression that it is part 
and parcel of the biped. 
In Labuan it used to be a very common occurrence for the 
graves of the Europeans, of which unfortunately, owing to its 
bad climate when first settled, there are a goodly number, to 
be found desecrated and the bones scattered about. ‘The 
perpetrators of these outrages have never been discovered, 
notwithstanding the most stringent enquiries. It was 
once thought that they were broken open by head-hunting 
tribes from the mainland, but this theory was disproved by 
the fact that the skulls were never carried away. As we know 
of no Borneo tribe which is in the habit of breaking open 
graves, the only conclusion that can be come to is that the 
