230 foniaiidcr C'oUccfioii of Haii'aiiaii Folk-lore. 



they were acquainted with the existence of the Papuan race in the Pacilic, as chstinct 

 from their own, and with their peculiar weapon of war, and that tliat acquaintance was 

 one of ancient and intense hosiHt}', I think cannot he douhted. 



In a recent work,^ Wallace argues very ingenuously that the Polynesian race is 

 merely a modihcation of the Papuan race, su]ierinduced hy an admixture of Malay or 

 some light-colored Mongol element, the Papuan, however, largely predominating, physi- 

 cally, mentally and morally, Ijut that such admixture probably occurred at such a remote 

 period as, through the lapse of ages, to have become a permanent type. He further 

 asserts that the presence of a decided Malay element in the Polynesian languages is 

 altogether a phenomenon of recent occurrence originating in the roaming habits of the 

 chief Malay tribes, and says that this fact is proved by the presence of a number of actual 

 modern Malay and Javanese words and not more Malay roots, as would have been the 

 case had their introduction been as remote as the origin of a very distinct race ; and 

 he concludes by saying that there are proofs of extensive migration among the Pacific 

 Islands, but there are no proofs whatever of recent migration from any surrounding 

 country to Polynesia, since there are no people to be found elsewhere sufficiently re-" 

 sembling the Polynesian race in their chief physical and mental characteristics. 



With these propositions, I cannot agree. \\'allace evidently classes the Battas, 

 Dayas and Buguis as Malays, — Malays of the modern generally received ty]5e. Inde- 

 pendent of traditional and historical proofs to the contrary, it does not seem to have 

 occurred to him that those Battas, Buguis and Dayas, though from the same mother 

 stock as the modern Malays, are an infinitely older off-shoot than the latter, and so 

 regarded b\' them : that the Malays, instead of descending through Burmah, Siam and 

 Malacca, claim for themselves a Hindu descent from the eastern coast, the country 

 of Kling and Telinga ; and that when they emigrated from that grand officina gen- 

 tium the Malay Archipelago was already in possession of the Battas, Dyas and Buguis 

 and their other congeners and contemporaries, of which I claim the ])resent Polynesian 

 family to have been one. He overlooks moreover the fact that the traditions, customs 

 and language of those very pre-Malay occupants of the archipelago, from Sumatra 

 to Celebes and Flores, Savu, Rothi and to some extent Timor, in a most remarkable de- 

 gree jjoint to central and northern India as their cradle and their source. He asserts 

 that the Polynesian has a greater physical, mental and moral resemblance to the Pa- 

 puan than to the Malay, and that ergo, he is, as regards origin, entirely distinct from 

 the latter and merely a modification hardened into a variety of the former. Had the 

 author studied the remarkable differences, physical, mental and moral, which character- 

 ize some of the Euro])ean families now known to be descended from the same source — • 

 the low-browed, turned-ni)-nosed, large-mouthed, boisterous Celt, and the square-browed, 

 aquiline-nosed, reserved Roman — he may have concluded that the Aryan descendants 

 to the east would have been as diversified in their national and tribal development, as 

 those to the west; and that the same law of \'ariation would operate on the one side as 

 on the other. His remarks — that the Malay element in the Polynesian languages is a 

 recent ])hen()nienon originating in tlie roaming habits of the Malays, and that that ele- 



°Alf red Russell Wallace : Malay Archipelago, New York, 1869, pp. 593-594, also 250-269. 



