88 
FASCICULI MALA TENSES 
every man was bound to put in two months 1 work in the year on behalf of 
the raja of the state, and it was the nai-ban's and the kem-nntts business to see 
that he did so. He could not be forced, however, to work beyond the limits 
of the district in which he was resident, and was only obliged to work for a 
short period at a time. The period was regulated by a fixed measure of rice, 
which he had to bring with him and which was supposed to last for about ten 
days. When the rice was finished he went to his nai^ban i who, if satisfied 
that it had not been eaten too fast, gave him leave to return home. Bachelors and 
foreigners not married to native women were exempt from all such impositions. 
Native householders have the right to clear as much jungle as they can keep 
in cultivation, the cultivated land descending to their widows and children, on 
condition of obtaining leave from their kem-nan and of paying a fixed proportion 
of the produce (differing in different districts, but as high as ten percent, at 
Sai Kau) to the raja, that is to say, practically, to the Siamese Government. 
Foreigners who have not taken a native wife pay nothing on the land they 
have cleared, and for this reason a small number of Bug is men and Malays 
from other parts of the Peninsula are still attracted to the Patani States. 
Conclusions 
It is obvious that the majority of the customs recorded in this paper have 
been deeply tinged by Mahommedan, that is to say Arabian, culture, but 
traces still remain, amidst much comparatively modern, of beliefs which may 
be regarded as having an extreme antiquity. Such we may consider the 
induction of sympathy between the life of a child and that of a tree by 
burying the after-birth at its roots. What is probably a similar practice, 
with regard to the same tree, prevails among the Baganda of Central Africa. 
The disgust evinced by Jalor Malays when triplets are born, and, especially, 
the phrase in which this disgust is expressed, are equally suggestive, and the 
diffidence felt in the presence of a mother-in-law is a wide-spread feeling 
among primitive races. 
The question whether similarities of belief, feeling or ritual of the kind just 
indicated point to a date when all mankind was a single tribe—a theory 
opposed by grave anatomical difficulties, such as the difference in the mode 
in which an upright carriage is maintained in European races and in some 
others—or whether, on the other hand, they do not rather indicate a logical 
identity in the human ‘species 1 —a convenient word, which may be either 
singular or plural—is too wide for discussion in the present strictly local 
contribution to ethnography, but it seems almost imposible to waive aside 
