THE PEOPLING OF THE PHILIPPINES. 261 



that the two peoples have been at all times so constituted; I am now 

 speaking of actual conditions. 



In the same sense I wish also my remarks concerning the Negritos 

 to be taken. Not one fact is in evidence from which we may conclude 

 that a single neighboring people known to us has been Negritized. 

 AVe are therefore justified when we see in the Negritos a truly prim- 

 itive people. As they are now, they were more than three hundred 

 and fifty years ago when the first European navigators visited these 

 islands. About older relationships nothing is known. All the graves 

 from which the bones of Negritos now in possession were taken belong 

 to recent times, and also the oldest descriptions which have been 

 received, so far as phylogeny is concerned, must be characterized as 

 modern. * * * 



Whoever would picture the present ethnic affiliations of the light- 

 colored peoples of the Philippines will soon land in confusion on 

 account of the great number of tribes. One of the ablest observers, 

 Ferd. Blumentritt,* mentions, besides the Negritos, the Chinese and 

 the whites, not less than 51 such tribes. He classifies them in one 

 group as Malays, according to the plan now customary. This division 

 rests primarily on a linguistic foundation. But when it is noted that 

 the identity of language among all the tribes is not established and 

 among many not at all proved, it is sufficiently shown that speech is a 

 character of little constancy, and that a language may be imposed upon 

 a people to the annihilation of their own by those who belong to a 

 different linguistic stock. The Malay Sea is filled with islands on 

 which tarry the remnants of peoples not Malay. 



For a long time, especially since the Dutch occupation, these old 

 populations have received the special name of Alfuros.f But this 

 ambiguous term has been used in such an arbitrary and promiscuous 

 fashion that latterly it has been well-nigh banished from ethnological 

 literature. It is not long ago that the Negritos were so called. But 

 if the black peoples are eliminated, there remains on many islands at 

 least an element to be differentiated from the Malay, chiefly through 

 the darker skin color, greater orthocephaly, and more wavy, quite 

 crimped hair. I have, for the different islands, furnished proof, and 

 Avill here only refer to the assertion that "a broad belt of wavy and 

 curly hair has pressed itself in between the Papuan and the Malay, a 

 belt which in the north seems to terminate with the Veddah, in the 

 south with the Australian." One can not read the accounts of travelers 

 without the increasing conviction of the existence of several different, 



* Versuch einer Ethnographie der Philippinen, Petermann's Mittheilungen, 

 Gotha, 1882, No. 67. '■ 



t A. Lesson. Les Polynesians, Paris, 1880, Vol. I, pp. 267, 283. [On this 

 objectionable word see A. B. Meyer, Tlie Distribution of the Negritos, Dresden, 

 1899, Stengel, p. 7.— Tr.] 



