xxxti 
FASCICULI MALA TENSES 
of them was partly covered with Cycads—a family of plants rarely seen in 
numbers in the Patanl States* 
The fauna at Tanjong Luar is that of the central region of the Peninsula* 
especially as regards the but ter flies, the only animals of which we made collections 
there. They congregate in enormous numbers on the Sungei Groh, which is 
very muddy owing to the tin workings higher up, and often settle in patches a 
foot or more square upon the banks. The yellow, red and white species, such 
as dppias nero s Terias and several Pierinae t keeping, as a rule, densely crowded 
and confused together, while the more sombre Euploetdae and their allies 
remain separate, consorting with those Papiltoninae which resemble them in 
coloration, and the large black members of this last family dart from place to 
place, settling to drink alone. 
At the time of our visit the people of the Ban Kassot were being deci¬ 
mated—eight adults out of about forty had died during the preceding month 
—by a disease which closely resembled rapid consumption in its symptoms, 
while the children, almost without exception, appeared to suffer from some¬ 
thing very like tuberculosis of the intestine. The houses of the village were 
unusually small and close, and were built in a little hollow, shadowed by three 
mountains, where the sunshine barely reached. As the people themselves told 
us, they * dwelt in the path of the spirits,’ which were constantly passing from 
one hill to another. This, they agreed, was the cause of their sickness, from 
which the neighbouring hamlets appeared to be free ; indeed, it was only 
here that we experienced in the Patani States any form of disease so rapidly 
or widely fatal as those frequently associated with the tropics, for cholera, 
plague and beri-beri, if they exist in the Division of the Seven Provinces, 
are very rare, while smallpox, though probably endemic in a mild variety, only 
becomes epidemic, virulent and awe-inspiring to the populace at intervals of 
several years. 
We had visited Tanjong Tuar in order to meet a tribe of Semangs, who 
were said at that time (November, 1901) to have taken up their abode for 
the rains in certain caves, for we had heard that their * herdsman * or guardian 
was the Siamese Nai-ban of Ban Kassot, and although we failed in this project, 
our three days’ journey from Kampong Jalor—much of it through flooded 
rice-fields in which the horse leeches were uncomfortably common—was richly 
rewarded by the acquisition of an authentic Semang calvaria, which we found 
lying at the base of a cliff where the rest of the body had been completely 
devoured by porcupines, and of an almost complete skeleton of the same race, 
procured for us from a cave, in which the corpse had become partially mummified, 
by the medicine-man, or mor t of the village. The Nai-ban, herdsman of 
