social organization is based on the family, the heads of which elect
the tribal chieftain, and their respect for the dead amounts to a
religion. Beyond the ancestral worship they have few rites, though some
ceremonies are performed to appease the evil spirits, and others at the
time of full moon and thunderstorms, and at births and deaths. Among
their myths is one relating to a mythical great serpent, who seems to
be a beneficent deity, pointing out to them where game abounds, and
where the bees have deposited wild honey. They are monogamous, and
neither steal nor buy their wives, the lover arranging the matter with
his chosen one, and then sending a present to her father. They have
learned the luxury of tobacco, and prize it highly, but for alcoholic
beverages they have no longing. As they are migratory, their house
building is limited to shelters of light materials, and for clothing a
breech-cloth is sufficient.[152]
In so many respects, geographical as well as physical, do these
dwarfish blacks stand between the Negro peoples of Austafrica and
Australasia that we are not surprised at the conclusion suggested by
Prof. W. H. Flower, that they may be “the primitive type from which the
African Negroes on the one hand, and the Melanesians on the other, may
have sprung.”[153]
_2. The Papuan Group_
Is found in its purity on the great island of New Guinea and the
chains east and west of it, but even there it discloses considerable
diversity. In color the Papuas vary from a coal black to a dark brown,
their hair is woolly, and there is considerable on the body and face,
stature medium, legs thin. Their lips are thick, and the nostrils
broad, but the nose is high and curved. Yet the best observers agree
that they vary extremely in physiognomy, and that in New Guinea,
tribes of equally pure blood have the skull sometimes broad, sometimes
long. These variations we may attribute to the influence of insular
conditions, or to some intermixture of blood.[154]
The Papuas belong to the lowest stages of culture. Some of their tribes
do not know the bow and arrow, and few of them have any pottery.
Their languages are agglutinating, but have this peculiarity, that
the modifications of the root are generally by prefixes instead of
suffixes, in this respect reminding one of the African rather than the
Sibiric families of tongues.
Their territory includes parts of the New Hebrides, the Loyalty Isles,
New Caledonia, Viti, and a variety of smaller groups. These islanders
are usually of mixed type, and are known as “Melanesians.” The natives
of the Feejee Islands are an excellent specimen of these, and their
archipelago forms the dividing line between the Papuan and Polynesian
groups.[155]
_3. The Melanesian Group._
The Melanesians, of all the islanders, present in individual cases the
strongest likeness to the equatorial African Negro; yet among these
there is that prevailing variability of type so frequent in insular
peoples. Their color passes from the black of the typical Negro to the
yellow of the Malayan; their hair, generally frizzly, may be quite
straight and of any hue from black to blonde. These variations are in
individuals or families, and are not owing to mixed blood.[156]
Unlike the Polynesians, the Melanesians are agricultural in habits, and
sedentary. They build artistically decorated houses, are acquainted
with the bow and arrow, occasionally make pottery, and construct
shapely canoes, though not given to long voyages. The women are modest
and chaste, and their religion is principally a form of ancestral
worship.
The languages of these islanders betray their compound origin. In form
and in the pronominal elements they stand related to the Malayan and
Polynesian idioms, and in structure approach sometimes the richness of
the former. In the Viti, for example, both prefixes and suffixes are
employed, and the possessive is added to the noun. The root words are
monosyllables or dissyllables, and drawn from the Papuan idioms, and
the phonetics are much richer than the Polynesian.
These facts go to show that the Melanesians are physically and
linguistically a mixed people, a compound of the woolly-haired black
Papuas, whom we may suppose to have been the aborigines of Melanesia,
with the smooth-haired, light-colored Malays, who reached the
archipelago as adventurers and immigrants. As their tongues form, as it
were, the second stratum of structure when compared with the Polynesian
dialects, we can go a step further and say that the ethnic formation of
the Melanesian islanders occurred subsequently to the construction of
the Polynesian physical type and languages.[157]
The ethnic relationship of the various adjoining islanders to the
Papuas has been studied by many observers, but its solution has not
yet been reached. The Papuas themselves impressed Hale as partly
Malayan--“a hybrid race,”[158] and Virchow calls attention to the fact
that a broad zone of wavy-haired peoples intervene between the Papuas
and the pure Malays, shading off into the Australians on the one hand
and the Veddahs of Ceylon on the other.[159] This is very significant
of the ethnic origin of the inhabitants of Australasia.
It is borne out by an examination of the Papuan languages. These are
quite dissimilar among themselves, and appear to have been derived from
a number of independent linguistic stocks. While these were originally
distinct from the Malayan, it is a recognized fact that all the Papuan,
and still more all the Melanesian dialects, have absorbed extensively
from Malayan and Polynesian sources, and we are certain, therefore,
that a similar absorption of Malayan blood has taken place.[160]
II. THE MALAYIC STOCK
Is by far the most important group of peoples with whom we have to do
in the area we are now studying. Many ethnologists, indeed, set it up
as a distinct race, the “Malayan” or “Brown” race, and claim for it an
importance not less than any of the darker varieties of the species. It
bears, however, the marks of an origin too recent, and presents Asian
analogies too clearly, for it to be regarded otherwise than as a branch
of the Asian race, descended like it from some ancestral tribe in that
great continent. Its dispersion has been extraordinary. Its members
are found almost continuously on the land areas from Madagascar to
Easter Island, a distance nearly two-thirds of the circumference of the
globe; everywhere they speak dialects with such affinities that we must
assume for all one parent stem, and their separation must have taken
place not so very long ago to have permitted such a monoglottic trait
as this.
The stock is divided at present into two groups, the western or Malayan
peoples, and the eastern or Polynesian peoples. There has been some
discussion about the original identity of these, but we may consider it
now proved by both physical, linguistic and traditional evidence.[161]
The original home of the parent stem has also excited some controversy,
but this too may be taken as settled. There is no reasonable doubt but
that the Malays came from the southeastern regions of Asia, from the
peninsula of Farther India, and thence spread south, east and west over
the whole of the island world. Their first occupation of Sumatra and
Java has been estimated to have occurred not later than 1000 B. C.,
and probably was a thousand years earlier, or about the time that the
Aryans entered Northern India.
The relationship of the Malayic with the other Asian stocks has not yet
been made out. Physically they stand near to the Sinitic peoples of
small stature and roundish heads of southeastern Asia.[162] The oldest
form of their language, however, was not monosyllabic and tonic, but
was dissyllabic. Structurally, it was largely of the “isolating” type,
the relations of the members of the proposition being expressed by
loose words, as is still the case in some of the Polynesian dialects.
This is scarcely recognizable in the developed Malayan and Tagala
idioms where there is a richly varied structure by suffixes, prefixes
and infixes; but the building up of these grammatical resources can be
traced back from the simple original tongue, or _Ursprache_, I have
mentioned.[163] We cannot be far wrong, therefore, in associating
in some remote past the ancestral Malays, with their isolating,
dissyllabic speech, yellowish-brown complexion, short skulls and small
stature, with the Indo-Chinese group of the Sinitic branch of the Asian
race.
_1. The Western or Malayan Group._
The purest type of the true Malays is seen in Malacca, Sumatra and
Java. They are of medium or slightly under size, the complexion from
olive to brown. The hair is black, straight and lank, and the beard is
scanty. The eyes are black, often slightly oblique, the nose straight
and rather prominent, the mouth large, and the chin well developed. The
skull is short (brachycephalic), and the muscular force less than the
European average.
This type is found among the Malayans of Malacca and Sumatra, the
Javanese, the Madurese and Tagalas. It has changed slightly by foreign
intermixture among the Battaks of Sumatra, the Dayaks of Borneo, the
Alfures and the Bugis. But the supposition that these are so remote
that they cannot properly be classed with the Malays is an exaggeration
of some recent ethnographers, and is not approved by the best
authorities.[164] The chief differences are that the Battak type is
larger and stronger than the average Malay, the skull is more oval, the
hair finer in texture and lighter in color.
In character the Malays are energetic, quick of perception, genial
in demeanor, but unscrupulous, cruel and revengeful. Veracity is
unknown, and the love of gain is far stronger than any other passion
or affection. This thirst for gold made the Malay the daring navigator
he early became. As merchant, pirate or explorer, and generally as all
three in one, he pushed his crafts far and wide over the tropical seas
through twelve thousand miles of extent.
On the extreme west he reached and colonized Madagascar. The Hovas
there, undoubtedly of Malay blood, number about 800,000 in a population
of five and a half millions, the remainder being Negroids of various
degrees of fusion. In spite of this disproportion, the Hovas are the
recognized masters of the island. Their language stands in closest
relation to that of the Battaks of Sumatra. In physical appearance they
have a striking likeness to the Polynesians, so close, indeed, that the
one may readily be mistaken for the other.[165]
On the great islands near the Malaccan peninsula there are tribes
in different stages of culture. Those on the highest plane are the
Javanese, whose ancient language, the Kavi, is preserved in their
sacred books. The Battaks of Northern Sumatra are an agricultural
people, who have not accepted Islam, and belong to the old stock of the
Asian immigrants. They are still to some extent cannibals, a convict
condemned to death being eaten by the community. The Dayaks of Borneo
are not less truculent, being cannibals and famous “head hunters”--that
is, their highest trophy of war and proof of manhood is to bring home
the head of a slain enemy. Some of them are agriculturists, others
sea robbers. Their dwellings are of the communal character, and their
religion an idolatry, the figures of the gods being carved in wood.
The Macassars of the Celebes and the Tagalas of the Philippines are
Malays of milder habits, and possess commercial importance and literary
culture. In these islanders there is a mixed class called Alfures, who
have attracted some attention as differing from the prevalent type, but
they are of no ethnographic importance.
The Malays probably established various colonies in Southern India.
The natives at Travancore and the Sinhalese of Ceylon bear a strongly
Malayan aspect. But the latter speak a dialect largely Aryac, and the
Veddahs in the interior of the island have a much lower cephalic index
than the Malay (about 72), and their language is derived about one-half
from Aryac and the rest from Dravidian (Tamil) sources.[166]
_2. The Eastern or Polynesian Group._
Some ethnographers would make the Polynesians and Micronesians a
different race from the Malays; but the farthest that one can go in
this direction is to admit that they reveal some strain of another
blood. This is evident in their physical appearance. They are
uncommonly tall, symmetrical and handsome, a stature over six feet not
being unusual among them. Their features are regular, their color a
light brown. Their hair is black, smooth and glossy, sometimes with a
curl or crisp in it, which betrays a touch of Papuan blood. All the
Polynesian languages have some affinities to the Malayan, and the
Polynesian traditions unanimously refer to the west for the home of
their ancestors. We are able, indeed, by carefully analyzing these
traditions, to trace with considerable accuracy both the route they
followed to the Oceanic isles and the respective dates when they
settled them.
Thus, the first station of their ancestors on leaving the western
group, was the small island of Buru or Boru, between Celebes and New
Guinea. Here they encountered the Papuas, some of whom still dwell in
the interior, while the coast people are fair.[167] Leaving Boru, they
passed to the north of New Guinea, colonizing the Caroline and Solomon
Islands, but the vanguard pressing forward to take possession of Savai
in the Samoan group and Tonga to its south. These two islands formed
a second centre of distribution over the western Pacific. The Maoris
of New Zealand moved from Tonga--“holy Tonga” as they call it in their
songs--about six hundred years ago. The Society islanders migrated from
Savai, and they in turn sent forth the population of the Marquesas, the
Sandwich Islands and Easter Island.
The separation of the Polynesians from the western Malays must have
taken place about the beginning of our era. This length of time permits
the best adjustment of their several traditions, and is not so long as
to render it difficult to explain the similarity of their dialects and
usages.[168]
The disposition of the Polynesian is an improvement on that of the
Malay. He is more to be trusted, and is more affable. In culture he
is backward. Pottery is scarcely known, agriculture is not carried
on, cannibalism was nigh universal, polygamy was prevalent, and the
relation of the sexes was exceedingly loose, especially among the
unmarried. The islanders, as may be expected, are singularly skilful
navigators and build excellent canoes. They do not hesitate to
undertake voyages of five or six hundred miles, and are such excellent
swimmers that if the boat capsizes they are in no danger of drowning.
Their weapons were the lance, the sling and club, but they were not
acquainted with the bow and arrow.
Their religion, until the introduction of Christianity, was a frank
polytheism. The deeds of the gods are related in long chants, which
also contain many historic references.[169] The word “taboo” comes from
Polynesia, and means “sacred,” “holy.” All objects which the priests
declared “taboo” were considered to be consecrated to the supernatural
powers, and to touch them was to incur sure death. They were accustomed
to set apart enclosures which were “taboo,” and served as temples, and
the images of the gods, in wood or stone, rudely carved, were there
erected.
Although their houses were generally of brush and leaves, on several of
the islands they constructed stone edifices. Such are found upon the
Caroline islands, on sacred Tonga, on Pitcairn, and on Easter island,
the last mentioned have excited particular attention, and have given
rise to various foolish theories about a previous race of high culture,
and about relationship to the civilized American nations of Peru and
Central America. It is enough to say that nothing on Easter island is
peculiar to its culture. There are stone platforms with rude stone
images on them thirty or forty feet high; there are the foundations of
stone houses; there are remains of a primitive ideographic writing. All
these occur also on the other islands I have named, and the natives of
Rapa-nui, as the island is called by the Tahitians, have nothing in
their language or arts to distinguish them from other Polynesians. The
pre-historic colossal structures on Ponape, Lalla and others of the
Caroline group, are of basalt, and testify to a creditable ambition and
skill on the part of the builders; but careful investigations prove
that they are “without any doubt” to be attributed to the ancestors of
the present inhabitants.[170]
III. THE AUSTRALIC STOCK.
Under the heading of the Australic branch, I would class together
the primitive inhabitants of the peninsula of Hindostan and of the
semi-continent of Australia.
The collocation may seem hazardous, but it has its reasons. The
physical traits of the two are not remote. In both the hair is black
and curly, showing Negritic blood, the skull is medium or long, the
lips are full, the nose not prominent, the color brown, and there is a
beard. The relationship of the Australians to some of the hill tribes
of central India has been referred to as possible by the naturalist
Wallace, and the linguist Caldwell finds Australian analogies in the
Dravidian tongues, and points out that both are of the agglutinative
type, and with family resemblances.[171] The suggestion seems close
at hand that the Australian is a compound of the Negritic stock of
Australasia with the Malay, the Dravidian perhaps with the Malay, and
also with some other Asian people.[172] The English ethnologist, C.
Staniland Wake, has advanced an almost equivalent theory to the effect
that a straight-haired stock combined with the Australasian Negrito to
form the Australians, but this straight-haired people he would attach
to the “Caucasian” (Eurafrican) race, for which there is little or no
evidence.[173]
_1. The Australian Group_
Occupies the whole semi-continent of Australia and the island of
Tasmania south of it. The last of the Tasmanians perished some years
ago, and Carl Lumholtz, one of the most recent of Australian explorers,
calculates the survivors of the native inhabitants of that continent at
not over 30,000 individuals of pure blood.
Their appearance differs considerably, although it is generally
conceded that they speak related idioms, and originally came from one
lineage and language. The Tasmanians had quite frizzly or woolly hair,
and according to reliable observers correspond closely in habits and
appearance to the Papuas.[174] Among the Australians of the north and
northeast coast this resemblance is still accentuated, and no wonder,
when the islands in Torres straits, one in sight of the other, form
natural stepping stones from New Guinea to Australia. On the west coast
the hair is straighter, and the signs of Malay blood are obvious. The
color varies from dark to light brown, and the beard is generally full,
the body being also well supplied with hair.[175]
The culture status of the Australians is generally put at the very
lowest. Their roving tribes are without government, they do not till
the ground, they go naked, and do not know the bow and arrow. Their
weapons are the spear and the boomerang, a crooked club which they
throw at the object. The story that it returns to the thrower is only
true of some used in sport (Lumholtz). Marriage among them is by
robbery or purchase, and the women are treated with deliberate cruelly.
Cannibalism in its most revolting form is usual, and the sick are
deserted. Their religion is a low fetichism, and they have no idols nor
forms of worship. Certain rites, as fasting, sacrificing, and solemn
dancing, clearly have reference to the supposed supernatural powers.
In some parts, however, they draw figures of animals with charcoal on
the sides of caves, and manufacture rude stone carvings.[176] They chip
flakes into spear-points, and are skilful in making fire from friction,
in catching animals and other simple arts. Their songs are numerous,
and are chanted in correct time.
The _corroborees_, or dances, constitute their principal religious and
social festivals. These are usually celebrated at night, by the light
of great fires, and accompanied by a horrible clangor, which passes
for music, produced from drums, flutes, and a sort of tambourine. The
chants relate to adventures in war and love, in boasting recitals,
and in descriptions of ancestral power. The initiation of the young of
both sexes into the duties of adult life is always accompanied with
some solemnities, such as fasting, incising the flesh in lines so as to
leave prominent scars, cutting the hair, breaking one or more teeth,
and with local mutilations of a painful and shocking character.
As usual among the primitive peoples, sickness and death are regarded,
not as natural events, but as the maleficent action of evil spirits
or living enemies. When ill, therefore, the services of the priest
or magician is called in to counteract the sorcery and to name the
adversary who sets it on foot. These adepts employ the same Shamanistic
practices, rubbing, blowing, sucking, howling, which are popular with
them everywhere, and if these fail, at least at death they can suggest
who the hidden enemy has been, and thus furnish a pretext for the
avenger of blood to start forth on his murderous mission.
In some parts the dead are burned; in others, the flesh is scraped from
the bones, or the body is exposed until they are cleaned by the ants
and other animals, and then they are carefully collected and placed in
an ossuary; or again, the body is buried in the hut where the death
took place, this is torn down and thrown on the grave, and the place is
deserted. The spirits of the dead are supposed to haunt the place where
the body is left, and as a rule to exercise an evil influence on the
living. Food is occasionally placed on the grave, and some ceremonies
of mourning are repeated for eleven months; usually, the survivors
refrain from repeating the name of the deceased, even if it is a word
of common use.[177]
Rudimentary as was their culture, it is interesting to notice that they
had developed the conception of writing. They were accustomed to send
information, and even describe events, by incising peculiarly formed
notches, lines and figures on pieces of wood, called “message sticks.”
These would be sent by runners for hundreds of miles, and could be read
by the recipient through the conventional meanings assigned to the
characters.[178]
_2. The Dravidian Group._
I have already given you a description of the general appearance of the
Dravidas or Dravidians. There is some physical resemblance among them
all, but here the similarity ceases, as they vary greatly in culture
and language. They are held to have been the pre-Aryac population of
India, and one of their tribes, the Brahui, is found north of the
mountains, in Beloochistan. When the Aryans entered India, about two
thousand years before our era, they either subjugated, destroyed or
drove to the south these earlier possessors of the soil. They either
became the lowest caste in the Aryac states, the “sudras,” or they
fled to the swamps and hills. Their total number at present is about
50,000,000.
Linguistically they are divisible into two distinct groups, the
Dravidas proper, and the Mundas. To the former belong the Tamuls, the
Telugus, the Canarese, the Malayalas, the Todas, the Khonds, and other
tribes of less importance. The skin of all these is brown, the hair
curly, the head tending to dolichocephaly. The Todas of the Neilghery
hills are regarded as of unusually pure blood. They are tall, with full
beards and prominent noses, the hair black and bushy. Undoubtedly many
of the Dravidas partake of Aryac blood through the long domination of
that stock.