LIVING MINERALS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3264, 8 July 1911, Page 10

LIVING MINERALS.

MALAY SUPERSTITION. To the old-fashioned Malay, minerals are as much alive as paddy, and not infrequently poor tin land lias been allowed to lie fallow that its yield might increase. The grains of ore are imagined as growing and multiplying like, -grains of- rice (says J. O’May, in the “Singapore Free Press”). Peraps We shall be told some day by those modern mystics who regard our present scientific knowledge as a- foeble and very degenerate remnant of the ancient wisdom that here Malay “superstition” practically the recent discoveries in physics winch indicate that lead is the ultimate decomposition product of radium. But it is simpler to suppose that Malays merely did not clearly distinguish between plant and mineral By a less complex route they reached much the same point of view as seme of the European alchemists, who held that, every metal has in it “a restless principle of growth.” Sir John Maundeville (1356) tells haw diamonds grow on rocks of crystal- in India the Less—that is, Indo-China, but the locality. seems to have escaped the notice of ore recent travellers. “They grow together, ale and' female, and arc nourished by the dew of heaven: and they commonly engender and .bring forth small children. I have oftentimes tried the experiment that if a man keep them with little of the rock and wet them with May-dew often they shall grow every year, and the small • will grow great.” Sir John refrains from saying definitely that his experiments succeeded, but. plainly the breeding pearls of Singapore would not- have puzzled him at all. The Malay, of course, has also reached the later stage of thought in which the control of minerals is attributable to bantu, or, as Mrs Besant calls them, “the nature spirits who build up minerals.” Heneo the need for propitiatory sacrifices and spiritcompelling charms in mining. Iho spirits, if thev choose, can move the tin hither and thither. Pawangs have certainly found' tin where Europeans had bored in vain. The latter may merely observe that boring for tin is a notoriously tricky business, but Malays and, I suppose, Thecsophists would maintain (to borrow a pleasant phrase of Mine. Vilavatsky’s) “in spite of all the scientists and sceptics that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud that nature-spirits wore at woi'k. Lh e of the divining rod on mines can hardly be called a superstition. In England its practical value in finding water is now almost unquestioned, whatever tho true explanation of it may be. But it may be noted that there seems to beno difference whatever between its performances in Malay and in England, save that in modern times it lias been principally employed for water in the latter country. Recently, however, it has been applied to tin there also.