Page:A Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language with a Preliminary Dissertation- Dissertation and Grammar, in Two Volumes, Vol. I (IA dli.granth.52714).pdf/296

 ornamental mat made of palm leaf. Mataram, the name of a province in Java, we find transferred to that of a place in the island of Lombok. The particular settlements of the Javanese are indicated on the north-eastern coast of Sumatra at the rivers of Dili and Asahan by the name Kut a-jawa, or the "Javanese castles," at the first of which, according to tradition, a colony of 5,000 persons established itself. To this people, too, must be ascribed the Sanskrit names of places beyond Java, as Indragiri, "the hill of Indra," in Sumatra, Sukadana, literally "parrots' gift," and Kuti, the "little fortress," in Borneo. With the exception of a few traces in the Philippines and Madagascar, no Malay or Javanese names of places are to be found beyond the limits of the Archipelago. We seek for them in vain in the islands of the Pacific; and I have already alluded to the few traces of them in Madagascar.

I shall conclude this enquiry with a recapitulation of the results which, I think, are fairly deducible from it. There is, then, no foundation for the prevalent notion, that, negroes excepted, all the descriptions of men from Madagascar to the utmost eastern limit of the Pacific, and from Formosa to New Zealand, are one and the same race. On the contrary, they amount to several. Nor is there any foundation for the received opinion that all the Oriental Negroes are, throughout, the same race; for they amount to still more varieties than the men of brown complexion.

Neither is there any ground whatever for the hypothesis that all the races of brown complexion speak essentially the same language, diversified by long time and separation into many dialects. Had this theory been true, the supposed parent tongue must have sprung up at a particular point, which the authors of the theory ought to be obliged to point out. Or it must have spontaneously sprung up at the same time at a hundred different and separate points, which would be a miracle in the history of. language. Before its dissemination on the first supposition, and when was created on the second, such a language must already have been, to a certain degree, a cultivated language; for many of the words of the supposed tongue imply no ordinary amount of civilisation, and are very widely spread.