250 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



By what race Madagascar was first peopled it is no longer 

 possible to say. The local reports or traditions of 

 Peoples* " primitive peoples, either extinct or still surviving 

 in the interior, belong rather to the sphere of 

 Malagasy folklore than to that of ethnological research. In these 

 reports mention is frequently made of the Kimos, said to be now 

 or formerly living in the Bara country, and of the Vazimbas, who 

 are by some supposed to have been Gallas (Ba-Simbd) though 

 they had no knowledge of iron whose graves are supposed to be 

 certain monolithic monuments which take the form of menhirs 

 disposed in circles, and are believed by the present inhabitants of 

 the land to be still haunted by evil spirits, that is, the ghosts of the 

 long extinct Vazimbas. 



Much of the confusion prevalent regarding the present 



ethnical relations is due to the failure to distinguish 



immigrants between the historic Malays of Menangkabau and 



Malayans ^e Malayan aborigines of the Eastern Archipelago. 



That some of the historic Malays (the Orang- 

 Malayu) have found their way to the island from time to time 

 need not be denied. But it may now be asserted with some 

 confidence that they could never have been very numerous, that 

 they may almost be regarded in the present connection as une 

 quantite negligeable, and that the Malayan settlement of Mada- 

 gascar took place in remote prehistoric times, not only long 

 Mala as before the diffusion of the Sumatran Malays over 



Speech not the Archipelago, but also long before the appear- 



Malay, but * . . . F 



Maiayo- ance of Hindu missionaries or colonists in the 



) ynesian. same region. This is no matter of speculation, 

 but a direct and necessary inference from facts now established, 

 such as the total absence of Sanskrit and largely of late Arabic 

 terms in Malagasy, and the general structure of that language, 

 which is not a Malay dialect, but very much older than Malay 

 -in fact an independent and somewhat archaic member of the 

 Malayo-Polynesian (Oceanic) linguistic family. There is a con- 

 siderable percentage of Sanskrit words in Malay, Javanese, and 

 Bugis, in fact in all the cultivated, and in many even of the 

 uncultivated languages of Malaysia, introduced with Hinduism 

 probably some two or three centuries before the new era. But 



