No. 61.— 1908.] 



PROCEEDINGS. 



65 



in the Paper read as to the Veddas' dislike of ridicule. The old 

 Korala said if anybody laughed the Vedda would immediately 

 draw his arrow — a statement that also confirmed one that was 

 made in a lecture by a Mr. Stephens at the Meeting of the 

 Society many years ago, and which was at the time discredited. 

 The real Veddas in that part of the country were totally distin- 

 guished from the Batticaloa Veddas. Commenting on the figures , 

 Mr. Lewis said it would be interesting to know how the disinteg- 

 ration of the Veddas took place. He thought it would be found 

 that a good deal of it was due to intermingling with other 

 people. 



Mr. Hugh Clifford said it occurred to him that they might like 

 to hear something of the Sakai people, whose name had been 

 frequently mentioned in the Paper that had been read to them 

 by Mr. Freudenberg. It was at one time his fortune to live for 

 extensive periods of time among the Sakais in the very centre 

 of the Malay Peninsula. The people at that time were so 

 primitive that many of them were unacquainted with the Malay 

 language, and their numerals in their own language were only 

 three. For everything over that they had a word that meant 

 "many," so that whether they were speaking about the amount 

 of their crop or the number of children they had the same word 

 was used to describe any number over three. 



One thing that struck him in the Paper just read was that 

 among the Veddas nothing in the nature of general terms were 

 in use. For instance, it was stated that the Veddas had no word 

 for star. With all due deference to the learned gentleman who 

 wrote that Paper, he (Mr. Clifford) would require some very con- 

 vincing evidence before he would accept that statement. The 

 Sakais, whose primitive character he had already indicated, and 

 the Pangan or Semang, whose appearance was very much like 

 that of a West Indian negro seen through the wrong end of an 

 opera glass — that is, they were similar in general appearance, but 

 very small — were so primitive that they did not plant at all, but 

 hunted, and with their wives and children passed in small family 

 groups from one part of the f crest to the other, picking up a sadly 

 precarious sustenance by the game they were able to destroy 

 and such roots as they w r ere able to grub out of the soil, yet even 

 these people undoubtedly had a word for a star, though he had 

 not been able to discover whether they had any name for any 

 particular constellation. They had a name for the moon, and the 

 sun also with them was the " eye of day." 



There was one curious thing among the Sakais to which 

 reference had been made, and that was their sense of colour. 

 Among the Sakais there were only three colours, though they 

 were gifted with a wonderful eyesight, which enabled them to 

 see with an extraordinary clearness in the deepest recesses of the 

 forest, that would surprise any trained human observer. They 

 had no general name for colour itself, but they differentiated 

 between three colours. When they came to think of it, as the 

 Sakai had only three numerals, they could hardly expect him 



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