Part 13

Like other mixed peoples, the Japanese vary so much in height, form of skull, hue and bodily proportion, that it is impracticable to set up any fixed type for them, further than to say that their general Asiatic aspect is usually unmistakable to the trained eye.[144] In mental qualities they are gifted, being intelligent, artistic, brave, kind, and honorable, fully alive to the benefits of a high civilization, and able to accept with profit all that the western world has to offer.[145] They are monogamists, and the position of woman has always been respected among them. The prevailing religion is the Shintoism or worship of the powers of nature, but Buddhism, introduced in the 7th century, has also many votaries. At heart, however, they are an irreligious people, like the Chinese, and are unconcerned about the ideal and the mystical. Many of their arts, like that of writing, were at first learned from the Chinese; but they have improved upon them, and given them other directions, as in the development of their phonetic from the Chinese syllabic alphabet.

Japanese art has attracted in recent years the admiration of the European world, and many motives in it have been accepted by our lovers of decorative effects. It is indeed wonderful in its technical finish, and its theory of composition has novelties which are worthy of imitation, but it is devoid of that something which we call the ideal; and its canon of proportion of the human body has never been developed to approach the classical models.

There is an extensive literature in the Japanese tongue. Most of it deals with practical subjects, and even the poetry is usually didactic in spirit.

The Koreans seem originally to have come from the same stock as the ancestors of the Japanese. They are of more positive Asiatic type, and are a mixed people, the ruling class (the Kaoli) having conquered the peninsula in the second century before our era. They closely resemble the Loochoo islanders, and doubtless are consanguine with them. Their industries are similar to those of Japan, which country, indeed, obtained many of its arts from China by way of the Korean peninsula.

LECTURE VIII.

INSULAR AND LITTORAL PEOPLES.

CONTENTS.--Variability of islanders and coast peoples. Physical geography of Oceanica. Ethnographic divisions.

I. THE NEGRITIC STOCK. Subdivisions. 1. The Negritic Group. Members. Former extension. Physical aspect. Culture. 2. The Papuan Group. Location. Physical traits. Culture and language. 3. The Melanesian Group. Physical traits. Habits. Languages. Ethnic affinities of Papuas and Melanesians.

II. THE MALAYIC STOCK. Location. Subdivisions. Affinities with the Asian Race and original home. 1. The Western or Malayan Group. Physical traits. Character. Extension. Culture. Presence in Hindostan. 2. The Eastern or Polynesian Group. Physical traits. Migrations. Character and culture. Easter Island.

III. THE AUSTRALIC STOCK. Affinities between the Australians and Dravidians. 1. The Australian Group. Tasmanians and Australians. Physical traits. Culture. 2. The Dravidian Group. Early extension. Members. Culture. Languages.

Before proceeding to the ethnography of the American continent, I would have you take a rapid survey of the inhabitants of that extensive archipelago whose islands are thickly dotted in the Indian and Pacific oceans, and ascertain as far as may be the relationship in which they stand to the population of the adjacent coasts.

_Scheme of Insular and Littoral Peoples._

{ 1. Negrito Group. { Mincopies, Aetas, Schobaengs, { Mantras, Semangs, Sakaies.

I. Negritic Stock. { 2. Papuan Group. Papuas, New Guineans.

{ Natives of Feejee Islands, New { 3. Melanesian Group. { Caledonia, Loyalty Islands, New { Hebrides, etc.

{ Malays, Sumatrese, Javanese, { 1. Malayan Group. { Battaks, Dayaks, Macassars, { Tagalas, Hovas (of Madagascar). II. Malayic Stock.

{ 2. Polynesian Group. Polynesians, Micronesians, Maoris.

{ 1. Australian Group. Tasmanians, Australians.

III. Australic Stock. { Dravidas, Tamuls, Telugus, { 2. Dravidian Group { Canarese, Malayalas, Todas, { Khonds, Mundas, Santals, { Kohls, Bhillas.

It was Darwin’s theory that the distant progenitor of man was an amphibious marine animal, and certainly from earliest times he has had a predilection for water-ways and the sea-coast. The lines of these have always directed his wanderings, and it is not surprising therefore that nowhere do we find the physical types of the race so confusingly amalgamated as in the insular littoral peoples. Not only is transit easier in these localities, but on islands especially there is a more rapid intermingling and a closer interbreeding than is apt to occur in continental areas. This not only blends types, but it has another effect. It is well known from observation on the lower animals that such close unions result in the formation of more plastic organisms, liable to present wide variations, and to develop into contrasting characters.[146] This holds good also of mental products. For instance, you might suppose that the dialects of the same island or the same small archipelago would offer very slight differences. The reverse is the case. In the same area the dialects of an island differ far more than on the mainland. This is a fact well known to linguists, and is parallel to the physical variations.[147] The ethnographer, therefore, is prepared to attach less importance to corporeal and linguistic differences in insular than in continental peoples.

_Physical Geography of Oceanica._--The island world of the Indian and Pacific Oceans is divided geologically into two regions, Australasia and Polynesia. The former, as its name denotes, is really a southeasterly prolongation of the continent of Asia, and was united to it in late tertiary times. The huge islands of Sumatra, Java and Borneo are separated from the Malayan and Siamese peninsulas by channels scarcely a couple of hundred feet deep; and from these a chain of islands extends uninterruptedly to the semi-continent of Australia. All these islands are of tertiary formation, and the subsidence which separated them from the main took place at the close of that geologic epoch.

The Polynesian islands, on the other hand, are of recent construction. They are submarine towers of coral, erected on the crests of sunken mountain ranges rising on the floor of a profoundly deep sea. Nevertheless the flora and fauna of Polynesia resemble that of Australasia in its strongly Asiatic character.

The islands of the Indian Ocean present some singular anomalies. Ceylon, though so close to the Indian peninsula, is not a geological fragment of it; while Madagascar, though four thousand miles away, was unquestionably once a part of Southern Hindostan.[148] This, however, was in remote eocene tertiary times, and long before man appeared. The hypothesis, therefore, advanced by Hæckel and favored by Peschel and other ethnographers, that the Indian Ocean was once filled by the continent “Lemuria,” and that there man appeared on the globe, must be dismissed so far as man is concerned, as in conflict with more accurate observations.

Yet one must acknowledge that it has some plausibility from the present ethnography of the islands and coasts of the Indian Ocean. There is a general consensus of opinion that the earliest occupants of these regions were an undersized black race, resembling in many respects the negrillos of Austafrica. Upon these was superimposed an Asiatic stock represented by the modern Malays; and the union of these two strains gave rise to the anomalous tribes which occupy Southern Hindostan, Australia, and some of the islands.

This historic scheme, which has a great deal in its favor, permits me to classify the great island-world and its adjacent mainland into three ethnographic categories as represented on the diagram.

Of these the most ancient is

I. THE NEGRITIC STOCK.

This embraces three subdivisions, (1) the Negritos, (2) the Papuas, (3) the Melanesians.

_1. The Negrito Group._

The Negritos may be called the western branch of the stock. It is noteworthy that they are located nearer to Africa, and that they more distinctly resemble the Negrillo stock of that continent than do the Papuas. To them belong the natives of the Andaman Islands known as Mincopies, the Semangs, Mantras, and Sakaies of Malacca, the Aetas of the Philippine Islands, and the Schobaengs of the Nicobar Isles.[149] It is highly probable that they inhabited a large part of Southern Hindostan, perhaps before it was united to the Himalayan highlands (see p. 88), and some have been reported in Formosa.

They are believed to have been the original possessors of Borneo, Java, Sumatra and the Celebes Islands, as well as parts of Indo-China; but except in some mixed tribes, as the Mois of the latter region, their stock has disappeared from those localities. It is noteworthy that not a trace of their blood has been found in Asia north of the Hindu Cush and Himalaya ranges.[150] Some writers have thought that they proceeded along the eastern islands as far north as the Japanese archipelago, and would explain some of the present physical traits of its inhabitants by an ancient infusion of Negritic blood.

In physical aspect they are of small stature, not more than one-fourth of the adult males reaching five feet in height; their color is black, hair woolly, nearly beardless, and the body smooth. The nose is flat, the face moderately prognathic, and the skull generally globular (mesocephalic index 80°-81°), but on the Philippines and in Indo-China rather dolichocephalic. Their forms are symmetrical, though they are thin-legged, without calves; their movements agile and graceful.[151]

They are averse to culture, and depend on hunting and fishing. As weapons, they know the bow and arrow, the lance, and the sarbacane or blow-pipe, but have not acquired the art of chipping stone. When they use that material, they split it by exposure to fire. They are timid and distrustful of strangers, and they well may be, as they have been pursued remorselessly by slave-catching pirates, and were constantly exposed to the brutal aggressions of their stronger neighbors.

The portrait presented of their tribal customs is rather pleasing. The 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.