FASCICULI MALATENSES 
69 
largely cease, while a return current is well within the bounds of possibility, 
the general expenses of living being very much smaller on the Siamese side of 
the frontier, where there is no considerabe mining population to send up the 
price of provisions, and where the authorities are holding out inducements to 
settlers in the form of partial exemption from taxation. 1 
To the south of Perak there seems to have been no settled Malay 
population in the State of Selangor until within the last five centuries, very 
possibly even until a much later period. Here the Sakai tribes have mixed, 
to a great extent, with hordes of Bugis men from the island of Celebes, while 
the country has been largely colonized by recent immigrants from Sumatra — 
Achinese, Korinchis, and other tribes — who are near akin to the civilized tribes 
of the Peninsula, but can generally be distinguished at a glance from either the 
‘ typical ’ Perak Malay or the ‘ Indo-Chinese ’ Malay or Samsam of the 
northern districts. 
Stress, however, must be laid upon the facts (1) that the process of im- 
migration into the Peninsula of races subject to Malay culture has probably 
been going on for at least a thousand years, and (2) that, though this process has 
been tremendously accelerated in most directions by European influence, the 
same influence has checked it in others ; for example, in the case of the Bugis 
men. It would be just as ridiculous to say that England became definitely 
and finally Norman, in blood and sentiment, on October 14, 1066 a.d., as to 
say that the Malay Peninsula became, in the same sense, Malay at any particular 
date. 2 The Peninsular Malay of to-day is almost as much a product of the 
confusion of races as the modern Englishman, and reversions to any one of 
his ancestors may be supposed to occur at intervals among his children ; nor 
does the fact that many of the races from which he is descended were near 
akin make it any the easier to unravel the history of his ancestry. Moreover, 
the Malays of the Peninsula have never been welded into one nation, and the 
native of Kuala Kangsar still looks on the Patani men as foreigners and 
barbarians, while he reverences the ‘son of Menagkabau,’ from central Sumatra, 
as the purest representative of his blood. It is this which would make a definite 
and immediate ethnographic survey of the Peninsula so important before the 
confusion becomes doubly confounded. 
1. In the Patani States a foreigner is allowed to clear land and keep it in cultivation without paying for it, 
unless, or until, he marries a native wife ; while natives, or foreigners married to native women, pay a fixed pro- 
portion of the produce to the government. 
2. Though by some the Malay Peninsula has been considered the original home of the ‘Malay’ race as 
distinguished from the Dyaks, Battaks, and other ‘Indonesians.’ Kohlbrugge, L’ Anthropologie, Vol. IX, p. I, 
Paris, 1898. 
