I.—The Languages of Borneo. By Sidney 
H. Bay, M.A., Fellow of the Royal Anthropo¬ 
logical Institute, Corresponding Member of the 
Polynesian Society. 
Introduction. 
During the winter of 1898-9, when returning from the 
Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, 
I accepted an invitation from Dr. Charles Hose, then Resi¬ 
dent, to visit the Baram district of Sarawak. I was specially 
interested in the languages, and by the kind help of Dr. 
Hose, whose influence secured the giving of information, 
and whose knowledge of the people enabled him to indicate 
the persons most qualified to help me, I obtained a large 
number of vocabularies. These were usually obtained by 
means of the Malay language but sometimes by Sea Dayak, 
and were measured by the length of a day’s boat journey, 
or the time spent in a native house. As, except in Baram 
itself, no lengthy stay was made in any particular place, 
little opportunity was found to study the structure of the 
languages, and only a few notes were made here and there. 
For all that relates to the Singgi Land Dayak, I am indebted 
to the Rev. A. Reijffert, of the Roman Catholic Mission in 
Sarawak. 
Whilst my collections in the Sarawak dialects were lying 
unpublished, the late Dr. A. B. Meyer conceived the idea 
of publishing a comprehensive bibliographical and statis¬ 
tical account of the languages of Eastern Indonesia. This 
was suggested by the publication of my Report on the 
languages of Torres Straits and New Guinea for the 
Cambridge Anthropological Expedition.* Dr. Meyer in¬ 
tended his work to be a corollary to that Report, and to a 
similar account which I was preparing of the languages of 
Micronesia. To illustrate the Eastern Indonesian languages, 
Dr. Meyer compiled vocabularies containing equivalents of 
the words chosen by me for the lists in the Cambridge 
* ‘Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits.’ 
Vol. iii. Linguistics. By Sidney H. Ray. Cambridge. 1907. 
Sar. Mus. Journ,, No. 4,1913, B 
