V.] THE OCEANIC NEGROES : NEGRITOES. 165 



mainland, can discover no points of contact between them and 

 any other linguistic group 1 . This, however, need cause no 

 surprise, being in no discordance with recognised principles 2 . 

 As in the Andamans, stone implements have been 



Stone Age. 



found in the Peninsula, and specimens are now 

 in the Pitt-Rivers collection at Oxford 3 . But the present 

 aborigines do not make or use such tools, and there is good 

 reason for thinking that they were the work of their ancestors 

 arriving, as in the Andamans, during the Stone Ages. Hence 

 the two groups have been separated for many thousands of years, 

 and their speech has diverged too widely to be now traced 

 back to a common source. 



With the Negritoes of the Philippines we enter a region of 

 almost hopeless ethnical complications 4 , amid The Aetas 

 which, however, the dark dwarfish Aeta peoples 

 crop out almost everywhere as the indigenous element, and 

 in many places as even the recognised owners of the soil 

 long after the arrival of the Malayan intruders. This curious 

 point, hitherto scarcely noticed, has been brought out by Mr 

 John Foreman, one of the best observers of the social relations in 

 the archipelago". After a graphic description of these aborigines, 

 "black as African Negroes," with "curly matted hair like 

 Astrakhan fur," and still widely diffused in small bands "over 

 the whole group of islands/' he writes : " For a long time they 

 were the sole masters of Luzon Island, where they exercised 

 seignorial rights over the Tagalogs and other immigrants, until 



1 Senoi grammar and glossary in Jour. Straits Branch R. Asiat. Soc. 1892, 

 No. 24. 



1 See Ethnology, Chap. IX. 



:5 See Mr L. Wray's Paper On The Cave Dwellers of Perak, in Jour. 

 Anthrop. Inst. 1897, p. 36 sq. This observer thinks "the earliest cave 

 dwellers were most likely the Negritoes" (p. 47), and the great age of the 

 deposits is shown by the fact that "in some of the caves at least 12 feet of a 

 mixture of shells, bones, and earth has been accumulated and subsequently 

 removed again in the floors of the caves. In places two or three layers of solid 

 stalagmite have been formed and removed, some of these layers having been 

 five feet in thickness " (p. 45). 



4 See on this point Prof. Blumentritt's Paper on the Manguians of Min- 

 doro in Globus, LX. No. 14. 



The Philippine Islands, &c., London and Hongkong, 1890. 



