532 Waigiou. 



was just such weatlier as a very bad English November or 

 February. 



The people of Waigiou are not truly indigines of the isl- 

 and, which possesses no " Alfuros," or aboriginal inhabitants. 

 They appear to be a mixed race, partly from Gilolo, partly 

 from New Guinea. Malays and Alfuros from the former isl- 

 and have probably settled here, and many of them have taken 

 Papuan wives from Salwatty or Dorey, while the influx of 

 people from those places, and of slaves, has led to the forma- 

 tion of a tribe exhibiting almost all the transitions from a 

 nearly pure Malayan to an entirely Papuan type. The lan- 

 guage spoken by them is entirely Papuan, being that which is 

 used on all the coasts of Mysol, Salwatty, the north-west of 

 New Guinea, and the islands in the great Geelvink Bay — a 

 fact which indicates the way in which the coast settlements 

 have been formed. The fact that so many of the islands be- 

 tween New Guinea and the Moluccas — such as Waigiou, 

 Guebe, Poppa, Obi, Batchian, as well as the south and east 

 peninsulas of Gilolo — possess no aboriginal tribes, but are 

 inhabited by people who are evidently mongrels and wander- 

 ers, is a remarkable corroborative proof of the distinctness 

 of the Malayan and Papuan races, and the separation of the 

 geographical areas they inhabit. If these two great races 

 were direct modifications, the one of the other, we should ex- 

 pect to find in the intervening region some homogeneous in- 

 digenous race presenting intermediate characters. For ex- 

 ample, between the whitest inhabitants of Europe and the 

 black Klings of South India, there are in the intervening 

 districts homogeneous races which form a gradual transi- 

 tion from one to the other ; while in America, although there 

 is a perfect transition from the Anglo-Saxon to the negro, 

 and from the Spaniard to th% Indian, there is no homogen- 

 eous race forming a natural transition from one to the other. 

 In the Malay Archipelago we have an excellent example 

 of two absolutely distinct races, which appear to have ap- 

 proached each other, and intermingled in an unoccupied 

 territory at a very recent epoch in the history of man ; 

 and I feel satisfied that no unprejudiced person could study 

 them on the spot without being convinced that this is the 

 true solution of the problem, rather than the almost univer- 



