58 RECORDS OF MALAY MAGIC. 
14 
eat aS Sb yea ve pe iSi> ae lS 
Darah Sa-titik, daging sa-rachik Ber-tali Kapada bapa. 
For a drop of blood, and morsel of flesh, one is still 
indebted to one’s father. 
This is equal to saying, that, although the women are the 
most important members of the community as. holders of the 
entailed property, one is still indebted to one’s father for mere 
existence; the axiom is a little plea for the mere man, after all the 
tendency that has been shewn by the Adat Perpateh to glorify 
the woman by making her the nominal owner of the soil. 
It is not nowever surprising that the woman should have a 
large share of importance in the tribe, as every body who has 
read or heard related the old tradition of ‘“ Dato’ Per-pateh pin- 
nag sa-batang ” will understand. Perhaps after all it was not 
the heroism displayed by a particular woman under trying cir- 
cumstances, that decided the ancient chief to fix the land of 
entail in the female him of descent; so much as it was the 
difficulty in determining in lawless times the paternity of any 
given child, the maternity would be easier to decide. 
15 
o\ he oS + ol Ae pur 
Hilang darah, ganti darah. 
Blood for blood. 
This on the face of it, isevidently the old Mosaic law—“ An 
eye for an eye, a tooth fora tooth”; but primitive Malays 
were not so wasteful of blood and life as to exact capital punish- 
ment except in very flagrant cases. 
The expression is explained by numbers 16 and 17 following. 
