FASCICULI MALATENSES 
79 
In it, ’Toh Sarilang is a little boy who is turned into a crocodile in the same 
manner as ’Toh Sri Lam, and who tells his mother how to cure the crocodiles 
when they become ferocious. Mr. Skeat, however, makes no mention of any 
ancestral cult connected with ’Toh Sarilang. In other parts of the Peninsula 
the crocodile is regarded as a being of extraordinary discrimination, 1 * and many 
curious beliefs are held regarding it. (For example, it is believed, both in 
Patani and in Kedah, that if a mosquito curtain is washed in the river all the 
crocodiles will become ferocious and attack human beings). At Lampam, in 
the State of Patalung (Muang Talun), the brother of a local Siamese raja has 
set up in the market-place a crocodile shrine 1 in which fishermen, about to set 
out to their work, make petitions before the skulls of crocodiles arranged upon 
a shelf. 
Other Beliefs Regarding Animals 
Both among the Patani fishermen and in other parts of the Siamese Malay 
States there are many persons who refuse to eat the flesh of certain animals, 
alleging that they cannot endure the smell of that particular kind of meat. 
It is true that Malays are very keen of scent and make far more use of the 
sense of smell in examining edible and other objects than Europeans do, but 
it is quite possible that these prejudices may have another meaning, not 
to be revealed to strangers. One of our men, himself a member of the 
Ikan Lelayang family, told me that another family, to which he was related, 
had two sacred ( kramat ) tigers attached to it. If one of its members was 
going on a journey, he could summon the two tigers to protect him by the 
way, and if he performed the semi-magical, semi-dramatic ceremony known as 
the c Princess Play ’ ( Main Putri ), the tigers would come and listen with their 
fore-paws on the ladder steps. 
These isolated facts, taken in connexion with the now moribund system 
of fish cults, tend to show that there formerly existed in the Malay Peninsula 
a system comparable to, but probably more highly developed and complicated 
than, that practised by the Sea Dyaks of Sarawak, and lately described by 
Messrs. Charles Hose and W. McDougall. 3 According to these authors, 
certain individuals among the Sea Dyaks have a guardian spirit ( Nyarong) y 
which becomes materialized in some animal, plant, or inanimate object. 
Naturally such persons refrain from injuring their materialized protector, and 
the cult may even become hereditary owing to a father pressing his children, 
or a chief his followers, to observe it. The fish cults at Patani, however, have 
become definitely hereditary, and communistic rather than individual. 
i. Skeat, t.c. pp. 290, etc. 
z. Scott. Geograph. Mag., 1900, p. 521. 
3. hum. Anthrop. Inst., Vol. XXXI, 1901, pp. 199 et post. 
