In the first number Prof. Haroda gives, with 9 plates, one of the best and most detailed accounts yet published of the gosekku, i.e. the five festivals of the seasons (viz. of seven herbs, of dolls, of the iris, of the Marriage of the Stars, and of the chrysanthemum). In the second number Mr. H. F. Cheshire briefly describes the well-known game of go.
Contains, amongst much other material, a valuable series of folklore notes from a little-known region. An account of an expedition to the Bah Country of Central Borneo describes various peace-making and oath-taking ceremonies, in which the pig is prominent. For blood-brotherhood each man smokes a cigarette containing a drop of blood from the arm of the other. "Every object has a spirit of its own," which requires to be conciliated. There is a "Superior Being" and "various semi-deities." Other notes describe a Dyak pig-hunting omen from throwing a humming-bird hawk-moth down the house stairs with a string tied to it. The Trengs have as chief deities a sky and an earth god, who have the hawk as messenger, and the former of whom rules over the dead; a folk-tale is given of the accidental discovery of the land of the dead, who are invisible except to eyes touched with their spittle; the soul reaches this land after the process of menulang, in which the bones are exhumed from a temporary grave, cleaned, and put into a jar; men killed on the warpath and women dead in childbirth are exempt from the necessity of menulang. There is also a very interesting conspectus of Dyak charms in the account of the 34 objects contained in two medicine chests.
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