FASCICULI MALATENSES 
3 
(/^). Semang Tribes 
Hami of Hulu Jalor (Plates I, II, fig. i). 
At Mabek, in Jalor, we met with one Semang family, consisting of four 
men and a woman, who called themselves either Hami or Suku, the latter term 
being Malay, and meaning ‘ tribe ; ’ while hami in their own dialect signifies 
‘men.’ They said that they represented the only wild tribe now existing in 
Jalor, and that it consisted of about twenty individuals of all ages and both 
sexes, but that there was another tribe or family living on the borders of the 
State of Rhaman, which called itself Mani — a term which also meant ‘ men.’ 
These people were known to the Malays as Semang , the proper Malay designa- 
tion of the Mabek tribe being Panghan. 
The aborigines of Jalor appear to have been fairly numerous within the 
last quarter of a century. Mikluchlo-Maclay met them on a hurried journey 
through that state about thirty years ago, while the Raja of Jalor and other 
natives and Chinamen assured us that there were numbers of them in the 
neighbourhood of Biserat even more recently, and that they entered the 
village frequently until within the last few years. It is impossible to state 
dogmatically that the Semangs are now extinct in Jalor, with the exception of 
this one small tribe, but it is probable that they are very nearly so. It should 
be noted, however, that a man-hunt, organized by a former Governor of 
Senggora, who was anxious to obtain specimens of them for exhibition in 
Bangkok, has so terrified the Semangs in this state, that the approach of any- 
one who seems to be important causes them to conceal themselves immediately ; 
while their Malay masters, afraid of losing their services, are most reluctant 
to allow them to be seen : indeed, we ourselves, owing to this circumstance, 
had the greatest difficulty in obtaining two short interviews with them. 
Three males whom we measured were 1,529, 1,511, and 1,482 mm. in 
height ; the woman was 1,476. All of them appeared to be adult, and the 
woman informed us that she had had three children. The colour of the skin 
of both sexes was between chocolate and red, 1 and was not noticeably paler on 
the tace than on the body. The hair of the men was sooty black, and covered 
the scalp in short ‘ peppercorn ’ curls ; that of the woman stood out from her 
head to the distance of some inches in a mass of stiff ringlets, being frizzly 
rather than curly. Their features were negroid, but their lips were not par- 
ticularly thick, and prognathism was only present to a slight extent. Their 
faces were broad, less flat than those of the Malays, and wedge-shaped. 
Their figures were slight but not ill-formed. The abdomen was but slightly 
1. These names of colours are derived from the British Association’s Notes and S^ueries on Anthropology , pp. 
17-21. For a definition of the other descriptive terms used in this paper, see under Physical Anthropology, postea. 
