TRIBES INHABITING PENANG AND PROYINCE WELLESLET. 89 



of the same race permit to unmarried girls. In the Malay States 

 the law sanctions slavery and subjects the person of the female 

 slave to the power of her master.* In this Settlement, the Malay 

 finds compensation for the deprivation of this right in that of 

 divorce, and the extent which it is availed of renders marriage in 

 practice little more than the legalisation of temporary concubinage. 

 The independence allowed to women, and the manner in which 

 their parents and other relatives usually take their part, enable 

 them to purchase their divorce, or worry their husbands into grant- 

 ing it, whenever they wish to change them. 



Siamese. 



The Siamese do not differ much from the Malays in their physi- 

 cal characters. The person has much the same height and form. 

 The remarkable flatness of the back of the head is more generally 

 present, the profile is also more vertical, the nose is more often 

 slightly arched, the mouth smaller and firmer. The chief peculia- 

 rities are the lowness of the hairy scalp and the staring expression 

 of the eye, caused by the retraction of the upper eyelid. 



The Siamese belong to that branch of the Himalaic race which 

 preceded the Tibeto-Burman on this side of the Himalayas. At a 

 very remote period in the history of this branch, the progenitors of 

 the Lau migrated to what afterwards became the Chinese province 

 of Yun-nan, and thus became, in a large degree, isolated from the 

 influence of the sister tribes who spread over the Grangetic basin 

 and Ultra-India, while the Mons and Kambojans became the great 

 maritime nations from the Irawadi to the Mekong, and the Ana- 

 mese occupied the borders of the China Sea as far North as Ton- 

 quin. The Lau retained their sequestered inland position until the 

 Chinese pushed their conquests and settlements into Tun-nan, 

 when between the 7th and Sth centuries hordes of the Lau re- 

 entered the basin of the Irawadi, established themselves at Moung- 

 Goung and gradually subjected and partially occupied Assam. Thus 

 in the 7th and Sth centuries, and subsequently in a.d. 1224, when 



* But if the master avails himself of his power, in the case of a debt-slave, he 

 does it at the sacrifice of the debt. — Ed. 



