PHILOLOGY. 397 



the question whether the physical evolution of man has proceeded from 

 a single center or from several foci in regions where climatic conditions 

 have proved favorable to such advancement beyond the plane of merely 

 brute life. I wish to suggest, for consideration in this matter, the 

 further fact (alreadj^ pointed out by Professor Rivers) that within the 

 Melanesian area, wherever we find islands of sufficient magnitude to 

 afford contrast, there is a marked difference between the people on 

 the coast and the much ruder and less advanced inhabitants of the 

 mountain regions within. This is known to be true of the great 

 Fijian island, Viti Levu, where Rivers has made valuable employment 

 of the cultural differences which he has found to exist. It is also, 

 within my knowledge, true of the larger islands of the Solomon group, 

 where the inland people of the mountains are distinctly lower in type, 

 physically, than the coast dwellers. I extend the investigation some- 

 what further than has suggested itself to the distinguished Cambridge 

 scholar. In the Malay seas we encounter several instances of the sort. 

 In Mindanao, the Subanu are distinctly lower than their Visayan 

 neighbors, both linguistically and culturally, and I interpret the record 

 of my collaborator, Colonel Finley, to indicate their physical inferiority 

 likewise. In Luzon we find as inferior and interior folk the Aeta and 

 the Bontoc Igorot. In Borneo we likewise find the same inferiority 

 to hold in the case of the Punan of the high mountain lands of the 

 interior. In New Guinea it has been established by recent exploration, 

 notably that of WoUaston in command of the expedition of the 

 British Ornithological Union, that there exists a considerable popula- 

 tion of nanoids, possibly to be classed with the pygmies. Tliis dwarfish 

 stature, characteristic in a greater or less degree of all these inferior 

 peoples, deserves to be mentioned. I do not in the least suggest the 

 interpretation of this characteristic of inferior peoples in terms of 

 physical evolution. But I can not avoid the recognition of one impor- 

 tant point, which may or may not be associable with the precarious 

 existence down to the present time of so many nanoid peoples in this 

 particular area of sea and island: It is in the same island region, at 

 the Trinil beds in Java, that discovery was made of the skeletal remains 

 upon which Du Bois has erected the genus and species Pithecanthropus 

 erectus. If students of the physical evolution of man in time incline 

 to recognize in the Trinil discovery the evidence of an Indonesian 

 focus of evolution, then I shall be prepared to recognize in the same 

 region a focus of the evolution of the speech of man. It is toward the 

 preparation of the science of philology for this step, after the students 

 of somatic anthropology have prepared the ground, that these studies 

 of the philology of the peoples of the Pacific have been addressed. 



