The priests must in many respects be regarded as impostors, though, of course, even with their deceitful practices is mixed much superstitious credulity. They pretend to meet and to converse with spirits, to receive warnings, and sometimes presents from them, to have the power of seeing and capturing the departed soul of a sick man, and to be able to find and secure for the Dayaks that vital principle of the rice which “Tapa” sends down from above at their two chief harvest feasts. To increase their authority, they do not hesitate to declare that they have predicted every event. No accident happens to man or goods of which they do not say that they had previous warning; and a sick man scarcely ever calls upon them for their aid when they do not tell him that for some time previously they had known he was going to have an attack. One of their commonest practices is to pretend to extract from a sick man’s body, stones and splinters, which they declare are spirits; they wave charms over the part affected, and jingle them upon it for a moment, then bring them to the floor with a crash, and out of them falls a stone, or piece of wood, or small roll of rag. At least half a dozen of these evil spirits are occasionally brought out of a man’s stomach, one after the other, and great is the influence, and not small the profit, of a successful priest. For getting back a man’s soul he receives six gallons of uncleaned rice; for extracting a spirit from a man’s body, the same fee, and for getting the soul of the rice at harvest feasts he receives three cups from every family in whose apartment he obtains it. The value of six gallons of uncleaned rice is not very great, but it is the sixtieth part of the amount obtained by an able-bodied man for his annual farm labour. The priestesses have their fees, but they do not make so much from the superstition of their countrymen as the male professors. _Manufactures._--Among these are baskets of fine rattan and coarse rattan mats. In each village there is generally a blacksmith who can make, as well as repair, their spears and choppers; each man, moreover, is his own carpenter, gardener, and farmer; in fact, does almost everything necessary for the welfare of his family. _Agriculture._--They plant rice, Indian corn, cucumbers, bananas, sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, kiladis, yams, beans in their farms and gardens, and all kinds of fruit-trees around their villages and on neighbouring hills. I will add a story which was kindly communicated to me by Mr. Chalmers as to the introduction of rice among the Dayak tribes.