514 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



every part of it in their light pirate craft, and settling where they 

 would among subject populations. They may be compared with 

 the Phcenicians in the earlier world as pioneers of navigation among 

 the far-eastern islands. 



The aboriginal people of Madagascar, again, were apparently 

 not African at all, but members of the still more ancient Melane- 

 sian race, which is scattered in little groups over so many parts of 

 the Pacific and the Malay Archipelago. This race apparently spoke 

 already, at an early date, the common Malayo-Polynesian tongue — 

 that widespread speech which, as we now know, forms the basis of all 

 the dialects in use from Madagascar itself, right across Java, New 

 Zealand, and Melanesia, to the Sandwich Islands and the very shores 

 of America. And, what is odder still, the Malagasy dialect of the 

 present day approaches nearest to that of the Philippines and of 

 Easter Island. In other words, at these immense distances relics of 

 an ancient common language survive, which elsewhere has under- 

 gone specialization and simplification into the modern Malay of Java 

 and its neighborhood. It is almost as though somewhere, among 

 scattered villages in Portugal and in Roumania, people were still 

 speaking tolerably pure Ciceronian Latin, which elsewhere had 

 glided by imperceptible degrees into French and Spanish, Italian 

 and Provengal, 



The lowest and oldest layer of the Malagasy population thus 

 probably consists of black, woolly-haired Melanesians ; above it come 

 true yellow-brown Malayan immigrations, the last of which is appar- 

 ently that of the dominant Hovas. These two have intermarried 

 more or less with one another. But there is also a true negro admix- 

 ture on the side nearest Africa; while the intrusive Arab has, of 

 course, established himself along the coast line wherever he found 

 an opening for his peculiar genius. Thus, even before Christianity 

 and the European element came in to disturb our view, the ethnical 

 facts of the island were tolerably mixed, and presented several prob- 

 lems on which I have not space to touch. But if this seems a good 

 deal of ethnology for a single land, we must remember that Mada- 

 gascar would cut up into four of England; and even in our own 

 country the known elements of the population, Silurian, Cymric, 

 Brigantian, Cornish, Anglian, Saxon, Norwegian, Danish, Norman, 

 and so forth, are sufiiciently numerous ; while modern anthropologists 

 would probably fight hard for an admixture of Palaeolithic, Neo- 

 lithic, Roman, Dacian, and Spanish elements, as well as for a trifling 

 fraction of Jewish, GyjDsy, Huguenot, and negro blood. It is a 

 truism now to say that " there is no such thing as a pure race " ; every 

 individual, especially in civilized countries, is a meeting place and 

 battlefield for endless hostile and confiicting ancestors. Our idiosyn- 



