168 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. V. 



from the ceremonies associated with marriage, births, and deaths. 

 But on this subject we await further information, and the 

 chief point so far established beyond doubt is the existence of 

 the family in the strictest sense of the term. Thus the family is 

 found to be everywhere the social unit amongst Australians, 

 Tasmanians, Andamanese, Semangs and Aetas, all of whom stand 

 at about the lowest grade of human culture. The more the 

 matter is investigated, the more current theories about group or 

 communal marriage based upon the assumption of the "primitive 

 human herd " and primordial promiscuity recede into the back- 

 ground 1 . 



In the sumptuous volume on The Philippines, Part n. Negritoes, 

 one of the Dresden Ethnographic Museum series (1896), the 

 editor, Dr A. B. Meyer, describes the Negrito hair as fine and 

 woolly, disposed in close spirals varying from a deep seal-brown 

 to black, and diffused evenly over the scalp, not in separate tufts 

 with intervening bald spaces. 



In this publication Prof. Kern brings together various speci- 

 mens of Negrito speech, all of pure Malayo-Polynesian type 

 and nearly allied to the Tagalog and Visayan of the Northern and 

 Central Philippines. But the specimens are all from districts under 

 Malayan influences, so that they leave untouched the question 

 of an original Aeta language corresponding to that of the Anda- 

 manese. The present Negrito population is here estimated at no 

 more than 20,000, distributed in small groups over the islands of 

 Luzon, Alabat, Mindoro, Panay, Negros, Mindanao, Tablas, Cebu 

 and Palawan, mostly full- blood, but forming half-breed communities 

 in Negros and other places. 



1 Ethnology, pp. 13, 14. 



