Excerpt from The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo, Vol. 1 of 2: Based Chiefly on the Mss. Of the Late Hugh Brooke Low Sarawak Government Service About the origin and primitive purposes of Prefaces, the learned may dispute, basing their results on historical research into prefaces at large. It is a probable opinion that the Preface was, at first, intended to inform the reader as to what he might expect to find in the book before him. In our own day, when nobody reads, and critics read least of all, a glance at the Preface (only a glance) furnishes the newspaper reviewer with his two or three inches of copy. Into the actual book he very seldom dips, and the anxious author receives, in criticism, what he has, in a Preface, himself set forth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.