FASCICULI MALATENSES 
59 
talent of their own. They manufacture spoons by lashing limpet shells to 
wooden handles with great neatness, and sometimes carve out wooden rice- 
stirrers (Plate XIV, fig. i) in the shape of paddles. Fire is almost always 
produced by lucifer matches or flint and steel procured from Penang, but 
occasionally a horn fire-syringe is still seen in use. Musical instruments are 
generally obtained from Kedah, the Malays of which have a reputation through- 
out the north-west of the Peninsula as musicians, actors, workers of shadow- 
plays, and the like. 
The most artistic indigenous productions are tobacco and betel pouches, 
made of delicate strips of bleached Pandanus leaf or grass plaited into bags, 
with a comparatively small oval aperture at the top. These have no cover ; 
they are extremely flexible, large enough to contain quite half-a-pound of 
tobacco, and finished with the utmost neatness. As a rule, there are several 
in a set, one fitting inside another, the outermost being the finest. The strips 
out of which they are made are shredded with an instrument resembling that 
used by the Seman and other tribes, but having the metal points set closer 
together than is usually the case among the Malays or jungle folk. 
The children make use of sharp pieces of mussel shell, not fitted into a 
handle, in cutting out the leaf figures with which they are fond of playing. A 
top, or rather teetotum, obtained from them differed from any specimen seen 
elsewhere in the Peninsula ; but it will be described in a subsequent paper on 
the toys in our ethnographical collections. 
The Samsams themselves assured me that they always buried their dead 
in the Mahommedan fashion, but I saw no graveyards in the vicinity of 
their villages, and Mr. A. Steffen tells me that they commonly practice ‘tree- 
burial,’ and that he has himself seen corpses suspended between trees in the 
neighbourhood of their houses. Mahommedanism sits very lightly upon the 
Samsams, and I have it on good authority that it is not uncommon for a 
youth, who has been circumcised and so ‘entered Islam,’ to become a Buddhist 
ascetic if any misfortune befalls himself or his family, without renouncing 
his former religion. This change is not so peculiar as it seems when one 
understands that the Samsams, like the Malays and many of the Siamese of 
the eastern Siamese-Malay States, believe Buddha Gautama and Moses to 
have been the same person. Thus they regard the status of the Siamese as 
identical with that of the Jews, whose dispensation — that of the Nabi Musa or 
Prophet Moses — v/as superseded by the dispensation of the Nabi Isa or 
Prophet Jesus, to give way in its turn to the Agama Islam or Mahommedan 
religion. Infidels who have a ‘writing’ (surat), that is to say, the Christians, 
Siamese, or Hebrews, and even the Chinese, are looked upon as being in a 
