650 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1920. 



because they are very shy, make their home in the mountain forests. 

 Their houses are rude shelters scattered through the country and 

 never gathered into villages like those of the Igorot. Little was 

 known in America concerning them until the acquisition of the 

 Philippines by the United States. 



They cultivate a little, but depend for food principally on the 

 fruits of the chase and forest products, a few of which they exchange 

 with the lowland people for cloth, rice, or iron sufficient for their 

 small needs. They are keen hunters of wild animals, and their traps 

 are quite ingenious. 



Their only weapons are bows and arrows, and in the use and manu- 

 facture of them they are very skillful. Among them is found a 

 primitive method of fire making by sawing a knife of bamboo across 

 another piece, as shown in the kneeling figures, the fire rising in the 

 ground-off dust which falls beneath when the lower bamboo is cut 

 through by the friction. 



The Negritos are cheerful, intelligent, peaceable, and moral ; they 

 love music, and one of their chief amusements is dancing; they are 

 born pantomimists, and, like children, dramatize the events they wish 

 to relate. While physically the Negrito seems inferior, in reality he 

 is strong, marvelously agile, and his black, wizened, dwarfish frame is 

 capable of incredible endurance. Though nothing definite is known 

 of his origin, the Negrito is thought to be a remnant of a once wide- 

 spread population related to the Papuans, the Andamanese, and 

 other black, woolly-haired peoples of Oceanica. 



The group represents a Negrito family before their rude shelter 

 habitation in the mountains, the women occupied in nursing the baby 

 and in pounding rice, while the men are making a fire with the bamboo 

 saw to cook a jungle fowl, which one of them has brought in. (See 

 pi. 75.) 



TRIBES OF POLYNESIA. 



The settlement of the multitude of islands which make up Poly- 

 nesia is the result of the most extensive migration known. This 

 migration is estimated to have begun from some focus in the East 

 Indies about 1,500 years ago. These emigrants did not know any 

 metal, and had no domestic animals except possibly the pig. They 

 had developed the art of boat building for deep-sea navigation and 

 had perfected the drying and packing in small compass of nourish- 

 ing vegetal food for long voyages. All this implies a considerable 

 advance in the arts and a long preliminary course of preparation. 

 The Polynesians have carried their arts all over the Pacific, and as 

 a practical uniformity is observed throughout the area, the whole 

 migration may reasonably be considered to have taken place within 

 a comparatively short period. 



