60. RECORDS OF MALAY MAGIC. 
17 | 
ele eas oly gl Sb Jo @ 
Anak di-panggil makan, Anak-buah di sorongkan balas. 
The son is called to the feast, But the nephew pays the debt. 
ee ee ~ 
This explains more fully how the debt of a life for a life is 
paid. 
-The Menangkabau code as understood here provides for 
succession first in the tribe and next in the family; it would 
seem absurd to a primitive people ;—Amongst whom sexual 
relations were not properly governed by even the laxly 
carried out Mohamadan laws of marriage and divorce,—that 
property, which amongst all savaye races is more valuable than 
life, should descend from father to son, when no man could 
with certainty claim an individual as his offspring; it was, 
evident that the landed property should be held by the women 
who, being proud of the ownerships, would not hesitate to ex- 
pend lalour onit: it therefore comes about that when a man 
of one tribe marries a woman of another, he becomes a sort of 
lodger in his wife’s house, her family and her tribe; the children 
that his wife may bear to him are not so much his children as 
the children of his wife’s tribe; they way inherit, as explained 
under No. 11., whatever he and his wife earned together dur- 
ing their married life; but his wife’s tribe have too strong a 
claim on them, to allow them to be taken from the tribe in pay- 
ment for a crime committed by their father, who isan outsider ; 
if he murders a man he must find a relation of his own blood 
and tribe to pay the debt ; and as when he dies his nephew 
will inherit his personal estate and any office or title which he 
may hold in the tribe, it seemed proper that his nephew should 
pay his blood debt 
