In this short monograph I do not pretend to give anything more than a Sketch of the Folk-lore to be found among the Borneans. The island is large, and the people, scattered and isolated by constant inter-tribal warfare, differ one tribe from another, in language, customs and appearance almost more than do Germans, French, or English; to say that any tradition or custom is common to all the tribes, or even to all of one tribe, of Borneans, would be far too sweeping. A still greater drawback to an

The inland tribes of Borneo, by which I include all the natives except the Malays settled along the coast, are without any definite forms of religious worship; they make idols of wood, but I have never seen any offering made to them, nor do they regard them apparently as anything more than as scarecrows to frighten off evil spirits. They are the children of Dame Nature and as such have inherited their mother's disregard for life, and this feature of their temperament has kept them in a constant

In the course of time, the dog and other animals began to multiply, and man imitated their example; the woman brought forth a male child, whose name was Machan Buntu . After many years, the woman gave birth to a female child who, when she was well grown, married her brother Machan Buntu and gave birth to seventy children at one time. These children left their home and scattered all over the world. Some became wood sprites and mountain gnomes, living in the trees, in the rivers, and under ground.

The tradition is that the great chief Tokong, when out on a war expedition, was told by Kop, the frog, that he should always take, instead of only the hair, the whole head of his enemies; Tokong was angry, at first, at the frog, but his followers at length persuaded him to let them try the experiment on their next attack. After taking the whole heads, the war party retreated quickly to the river down which they had come, and came to the spot where they had left their boats and were surprised to

Companions to the stories of visits to the regions below the earth are stories of visits to the world above the skies, to which adventurous heroes climb either by vines or ropes, which dangle suddenly in front of them, or by means of lofty trees. "Jack and the Bean Stalk" is a parallel story in our own folklore. Sir Spencer St. John [1] gives a Dayak account of the introduction of rice among the Orang Iban, as they call themselves, which states that "when mankind had nothing to eat but fruit and

To revert to the subject of names; from all that I have read, and from personal observation, it seems that all Borneans recognize the sanctity of names; of this we may find traces among all the primitive people of the earth. Before the formal ceremony of naming a child, for instance, has been performed, the child has no recognized place in the community, and a mother in enumerating her children would never think of mentioning one that had died before it was named, even though it had lived a year