660 
THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. CHALLENGER: 
regular door for entrance, and the place becomes a convenient store-house. As a further 
stage, boards are nailed between the piles, and a secure chamber is obtained. . PI. XXVIII. 
is a photograph of two Bisayan pile-dwellings at Samboangan which are thus placed on 
shore, although still, as is to be seen, close to the water’s brink. In the smaller one on the 
right remains of the platform are seen in front of the door with the ladder leading 
up to it. The space beneath the house occupied by the supporting piles is in its primitive 
condition unenclosed. In the case of the larger house on the left, the area between the 
piles beneath the actual house is completely enclosed by a fence ; the platform ladder 
and entrance are not seen, being on the other side of the house. 
A further step again, is the adoption of stone pillars for the wooden piles. Wooden 
houses thus supported on stone representatives of piles, may often be seen with an iron 
railing, passing from pillar to pillar beneath, and in this way forming an enclosure. 
From stone pillars the step is easy to arches, supported on pillars of masonry as a sub- 
structure ; and some houses of business, although their upper structures have ceased to be 
wooden, and are built of more solid materials, are still to be seen amongst the rest, sup- 
ported thus on the descendants of piles. In the last stage the arches are discarded, and 
continuous walls of masonry substituted as a support to the wooden superstructure. 
Even then the ground floor is often still used only as a storehouse or piggery, but in 
many cases is regularly occupied. Thus in these houses, what would seem almost an 
impossibility is nevertheless the fact : the ground floor is an addition to the first 
storey, which latter is older than it, and preceded it. The verandah is the representative 
of the platform originally intended for the inhabitants to land on from canoes. The 
building of one house was watched, which, when finished, looked perfectly two-storied, 
the lower part being neatly boarded in, and provided with a door and windows. 
Nevertheless, in the construction of the house, the history of its development was exactly 
recapitulated, just as is the case familiarly in natural history. The roof and first storey 
were built first complete upon the piles, and the lower structure added in afterwards. 
The remarkable resemblance of many of these Malay houses to Swiss chalets is 
most striking. In the chalet the basement enclosed with stone walls is usually only a 
cattle stall, the first storey is the dwelling house, and as in the Malay building, is con- 
structed of wood. It seems possible that the chalet is the ancient lake-dwelling gone on 
shore, like the Malay pile-dwelling, and that the substructure of masonry represents the 
piles which formerly supported the inhabited portion of the house. There are similar 
balconies in the chalets representing possibly the platforms. A good deal of the carving 
of balconies, and some of the staircases, in the better constructed wooden houses in Ilo 
Ilo, reminded one very much of that of the same structure in chalets, though the resem- 
blance in this case is accidental. 
The most interesting feature about pile-dwellings seems to be their very wide geogra- 
phical extension. Representatives of almost all races of men seem to have arrived at the 
