482 BUR}fA, ITS PEOPLE AND PRODUCTIONS. 



beads wom vouml the waist. Climbing up on to tlic deck of the barge, these leaves 

 got naturally a good deal displaced, some turned on one side, some cociied right up, 

 but this put the ladi(;s in no way out of countenance, and with easy grace, they 

 readjusted them (just as one sees other ladies in society adjust their dorsal pro- 

 tuberances on rising) patting them from side to side, till they had assumed that 

 perfectly vertical position so essential, at any rate if anything was to be veiled from 

 j)ublic gaze. Be it however understood that in reality these poor naked monkey-men 

 and women are virtuous to a degree : such a thing as unchastity is absolutely iiuheard 

 of, and des])ite their utter nakedness, despite their repulsive ugliness, these women 

 really looked and impressed one with a sense that they are modest." It is not, I 

 presume, the intention of the writer in the above passage, so creditable alike to himself 

 and bis humble friends, to cbiim for them an absolute morality, in its highest sense, 

 as understood among ourselves, but merely to testify to the utter absence among 

 them of systematic or venal profligacy, that fungoid growth with which our own 

 civilization is riddled. Another pleasing trait in these children of nature is their 

 alfection for one another. Tliis is noticed by Mr. Ball (Jungle Life in India, p. 211), 

 who declares that when a shindy takes place among them, with a free use of bows 

 and aiTows, a " man on either side being struck was the signal for a cessation of 

 hostilities." Physically the indigent would seem therefore to be well formed, and, 

 both mentally and corporeally, appreciably above the lowest races, such as the 

 Fuegians. Their colour is black, when the true colour of their skin is revealed 

 by assiduous washing, and the hair grows in woolly tufts, as in other Negrito races. 

 The following extract from a paper by G. E. Dobson, Esij., in the Journal of the 

 Anthropological Institute, gives the views held by Mr. Wallace and M. de Quatrefiigcs 

 of their racial affinities, which seem to exhaust all that can at present be said on the 

 question. These conclusions, briefly stated, are : 



" I. That their position on an island to which nothing attracted strangers has 

 resulted in the preservation of a very great, if not absolute, purity of blood, so that 

 the Mincopies of the Andamans may be taken as the type of the race to which they 

 belong. • 



"II. That they belong to an original negro stock, of which the Negritos may 

 be considered one of the branches, and the Mincopies a branchlet of the latter. 



"III. That the Mincopie branchlet is found on the Andamans, Kicobars, and 

 in the I'hilippines, and is still represented on the continent in the Samangs of 

 Malacca and most probably primitively occupied all or part of India. 



" IV. That the Mincopie branchlet lias furnished the negro element of a portion 

 at least of the Dra vidian peoples. Further, to judge from characters aiforded from 

 the examination of skulls, some pariahs (of India) are almost pure Mincopies." 



"It is impossible to account for the presence of the wild tribes of Southern 

 India, among which the dwellers in trees certainly occupy a lower place in the scale of 

 civilization than even the Andamanese, or of the peculiar Samangs of the interior 

 of the Malay Peninsula, surrounded by races, with which they have no connexion 

 wliatevcr, except on the hypothesis that they are the few surviving descendants of 

 a woolly-haired people, which in ages past occupied lands south of the Himalayas, 

 when the continent of Asia included within its southern limits the Andamans, 

 Nicobars, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the Philippine Islands, and that the present 

 inbabitauts of the Andamans, and the Negritos of the Philippines, are also the 

 remnants of those ancient Negrito inhabitants of Southern Asia, which have almost 

 disappeared before the invading Aryan and Mongolian races. 



" The Negiitos most probably belong to the x'ery same original stock as the African 

 Nogros, occupying at a very distant period a great continent in the Indian Ocean, the 

 ' Lemuria ' of Dr. Sclater, which seems to have once extended from Afi'iea or 

 Madagascar to the Malay Archipelago. At tluit period the southern coast of Asia 

 was probably formed by the Himalayas, and the high lauds of the peninsula of India 

 were islands in the Indian Ocean inhabited by ]ieoi)le belonging to the same race as 

 tliat occupying tlic great continent southward of them, and whose descendants are 

 still found in the homes of tlieir foretathers. Though this great ('(juatorial continent 

 lias almost wholly disappeared beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, the animals 



