463 MALAY AMOKS REFERRED TO MAHOMEDANrSM. 
the neck until you are dead. Your body will then be handed 
over to the surgeons for dissection, and your mangled limbs, 
instead of being restored to your friends for decent interment, 
will be cast into the sea, thrown into a ditch, or scattered on 
the earth at the discretion of the Sheriff. And may God 
Almighty have mercy on your miserable soul! 
Sir William Norris, 
MALAY AMOKS AND PIRACIES. 
What can we do to abolish them ? 
The picture which we have above presented suggests many 
reflections pointing different ways, some exceedingly painful 
which we suppress. Is it well that justice should so closely 
imitate revenge as almost to kill the criminal red hand 3 Is 
it well that justice should proceed to the execution of its office 
while the blood of the victim is hardly yet dry, and its cry 
too powerful to permit of a calm and deliberate exercise of 
the judgment ? Had the trial not followed so rapidly on the 
crime, is it possible that a different view might have been 
taken of the condition of mind under which the criminal 
acted? But passing by these, and some still graver thoughts, 
let us ask if a government which merely kills a Malay who 
runs amok * does its duty ? Is this killing which it does per¬ 
form of any benefit to society ?—and is there nothing which it 
fails to perform that might tend to put an end to these dread¬ 
ful tragedies? These amoks result from an idiosyncracy or 
peculiar temparament common amongst Malays, a tempara- 
ment which all who have had much intercourse with them must 
have observed, although they cannot account for or thoroughly 
understand. It consists in a proneness to chronic disease of 
feeling, resulting from a want of moral elasticity, which leaves 
the mind a prey to the pain of grief, until it is filled with a 
malignant gloom and despair, and the whole horizon of exist¬ 
ence is overcast with blackness. If the reader thinks we 
have sketched the progress of a monomania, we answer that 
the great majority of pengamoks are monomaniacs. What¬ 
ever name we give the mental condition in which they are, 
and whatever our views of their responsibility for their acts, 
* AmoTc, a muck : mengamo' to rim a muck : pengamo’, the person who 
run i a muck. 
