There is such a rich and varied quantity of plants growing in the jungle which produce poison, that Man has the choice of using the one he deems more adapted for this or that particular need.
The Sakai is enthusiastic over his poisons, so much is he engrossed in the science that it takes with him the post of a besetting. Like a maniac which always speaks of his strange fancies, so this poor savage speaks all day long of his poisons, and studies their qualities.
And they provide him with all the necessaries for his primitive existence for he utilizes them in shooting, fishing, and in setting traps for big and small animals, they are a defence for himself and the whole village where he lives, besides furnishing him with the means (by barter) of obtaining tobacco, rice or any other article that cannot be found in the forest.
All his best intellectual faculty is consecrated to the research and preparation of poisons because it must not be thought that he uses one instead of the other indifferently. Those with which he is most familiar are each used as the occasion may require.
Just as a gun is not loaded with the same sized shot when shooting small birds and partridges, the Sakai does not waste his strong poisons when a weaker one would be equally effectual.
His selection of one rather than the other is frequently regulated by the state of the atmosphere (damp being pernicious to venomous productions) and sometimes by the phases of the moon.
These plants are herbaceous, arboreous and often creepers, but not all those that grow in the forest, nor even those known to the savage for their efficacy, are yet in the knowledge of Science.
This is a very great pity as I fear that these medicinal treasures, which may contain miraculous properties, will be inevitably lost if a scientific study of this wild jungle produce is not quickly initiated.
The fever of colonization has attacked the forest and here and there it rages; for certain it will not be a long time before that vast extension of tropical vegetation with the extraordinary fertility of its soil will give place to plantations of Parah-rubber, gutta-percha, coffee, sugar, rice, tobacco, etc.
For this reason I shall be very pleased to give what aid I can to the cause of Science by means of notes, collections and specimens of paints and animals not yet thoroughly known or studied, should anyone feel inclined to respond to the offer before it is too late. Such help would seem to me a sweet chain of thought, linking the mind of the colonist in the remote depths of the Malay Forest, to the Mother Country and that civilization from which he has withdrawn himself.