human being, would seem to be based upon an extremely cynical appreciation of
the blood-thirsty character of our race. The white man and the brown, the yellow
and the black, independently, and without receiving the idea from one another,
have all found the same explanation for the like phenomena, all apparently
recognising the truth of the Malay proverb, that we are like unto the tôman fish
that preys upon its own kind. This general opinion, which seems the more
worthy of acceptance in that it is the reverse of flattering to the very races that
have formed this curious estimate of their own unlovely character, might by the
ignorant and vulgar be supposed to be the real basis of the belief of which I
speak, were it not for that dictum of the Society for Psychical Research to which
I have above referred. But bowing to this authority, we must accept the Loup
Garou and all its kith and kin as stern realities, and not attribute it, as we might
perhaps have been inclined to do, to a deadly fear of wild beasts, coupled to a
thorough knowledge of the unpleasant qualities of primitive human nature.
Educated Europeans, who live in a land where even Nature, when she can be
seen for the houses, has had man's hall-mark scarred deep into her face, are apt
to think that the Age of Superstition has gone to fill the lumber-room of the past.
Occasionally they are awakened from this belief by the torturing of a witch in a
cabin by an Irish-bog; but even an event so near home as that is powerless to
altogether disabuse their minds of their preconceived opinion. The difficulty
really is, that they cannot get completely rid of the notion that the world is
peopled by educated Europeans like themselves, and by a few other unimportant
persons, who do not matter. They know that, numerically, they are as but a drop
in the ocean of mankind, but it is possible to know a thing very thoroughly and
to realise it not at all. Thus they come by their false opinion; for, in truth, the
Age of Superstition lives as lustily to-day, as when, in past years, witches blazed
at Smithfield, or died with rending gulps and bursting lungs, lashed fast to an
English ducking stool.
In the remote portions of the Malay Peninsula we live in the Middle Ages, with
all the appropriate accessories of the dark centuries. Magic and evil spirits,
witchcraft and sorcery, spells and love-potions, charms and incantations are, to
the mind of the native, as real and as much a matter of everyday life as are the
miracle of the growing rice, and the mysteries of the reproduction of species.
This must be not only known but realised, not only accepted as a theory, but
acknowledged as a fact, if the native view of life is to be understood and
appreciated. Tales of the marvellous and the supernatural excite interest and fear
in a Malay audience, but they occasion no surprise. Malays know that strange