144 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Gilolo Mixed Papuans ; Indonesians in the north. 

 Waigiu ; Salwatti ; Batanta -- Malayans on the coast; 

 Papuans inland. 



From this apparently chaotic picture, which in some places, 

 such as Timor, presents every gradation from the full-blood 

 Papuan to the typical Malay, Crawfurd concluded that the eastern 

 section of Malaysia constituted a region of transition 

 f between the yellowish-brown lank-haired and the 



Displacements dark-brown or black mop-headed stocks. In a 



and Crossings. . . 



sense this is true, but not in the sense intended by 

 Crawfurd, who by "transition" meant the actual passage by some 

 process of development from type to type independently of 

 interminglings. But such extreme transitions have nowhere taken 

 place spontaneously, so to say, and in any case could never have 

 been brought about in a small zoological area presenting every- 

 where the same climatic conditions. Biological types may be, and 

 have been, modified in different environments, arctic, temperate, or 

 tropical zones, but not in the same zone, and if two such marked 

 types as the Mongol and the Negro are now found juxtaposed in the 

 Malaysian tropical zone, the fact must be explained by migrations 

 and displacements, while the intermediate forms are to be at- 

 tributed to secular intermingling of the extremes. Why should a 

 man, passing from one side to another of an island 10 or 20 miles 

 long, be transformed from a sleek-haired brown to a frizzly-haired 

 black, or from a mercurial laughter-loving Papuan to a Malayan 

 " slow in movement and thoroughly phlegmatic in disposition, 

 rarely seen to laugh or become animated in conversation, with ex- 

 pression generally of vague wonder or weary sadness ri ? 



Wallace's classical description of these western Papuans, who 



are here in the very cradleland of the race, can 



Papuan and never lose its charm, and its accuracy has been fully 



contrasts. confirmed by all later observers. " The typical 



Papuan race," he writes, " is in many respects the 

 very opposite of the Malay. The colour of the body is a deep 

 sooty-brown or black, sometimes approaching, but never quite 

 equalling, the jet-black of some negro races. The hair is very 



1 Dr S. J. Hickson, A Naturalist in North Celebes, 1889, p. 203. 



