Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/91

Rh and ingenious effort to the contrary, that, if they had not one common origin, yet still there must have been a considerable intercourse and admixture among them to produce such a result. Mr. Earl's work shows the same conclusion, and Dr. Latham has followed them in these opinions refining however upon their subdivisions and inventing names for them, which have only the effect of complicating a question which rather required simplification. Even if Ethnography as a science be in any way distinct from Ethnology, still it is further removed from Geography and should refer to characteristics of people in their approaches to one another, their diversities, rather than to their mere locations. Dr. Latham in his new work Varieties of the Human Species, observes of the inhabitants of the Oceanic group, that their diffusion is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in Ethnology" p. 341, and giving them some extraordinary new names as Protonesians, Amphinesians, Kelaenonesians and others, admits the fact that many of the tribes, of different hues, and some absolutely black speak the same language. The people of Semang and Jokong, to whom he especially refers, are however inhabitants of the interior of the Peninsula of Malacca, which Peninsula like most of the islands of the Archipelago is inhabited by the Negro or Papuan race in the interior and by the brown coloured people or Malays on the sea coasts. All writers concur in concluding from this that the blacks were the original inhabitants and the others were intruders. But then arises the difficulty to be explained why do all these people in many cases as in the Philippine islands speak the same language, and in others a language with so strong an admixture of the Malay? We may pass by any notices of their manners or habits which among rude people in the same climate may always be expected to be somewhat similar. But as we are told by every writer that all these various coloured tribes are at constant enmity with one another, so that it is impossible to suppose that they learned those languages by any friendly communication, it appears to me an inevitable conclusion from these premises that the opinion given by the Spanish writer is correct, and that the brown coloured people are in reality only the descendants of some lighter colored people who had intruded into the countries of the blacks, and thereupon taking the women for themselves had left a progeny now known in the East as Malays. If this theory be correct, it follows that the Malays are not a pure and distinct race of men as has been commonly supposed, but a mixed and mulatto race between the red and the black. I take the word race in accordance