188 Mr Crawfurd on the 



navigation, agriculture, the mechanical arts, the calendar, 

 war, government, and even literature. 



If, then, one language only had ever existed, we are re- 

 duced to the necessity of supposing that the people who spoke 

 it were one race, and that they were in a social state of 

 considerable advancement before they were dispersed, and 

 their language broken down into the chaos of tongues at pre- 

 sent existing, an hypothesis without the shadow of a proof. 



Had such a language ever existed, we would not have 

 failed to have had the same kind of evidence of it, which the 

 modern languages of the south of Europe afford of the ex- 

 istence of Latin ; that is, a virtual agreement in the most 

 familiar nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, and 

 particles ; but of this there is nothing whatever in the lan- 

 guages of the Archipelago. 



There are but two languages in the Indian and Pacific 

 Islands that have been widely spread, the Malay in the first, 

 and the Polynesian in the last ; and the evidence of a common 

 origin in these, respectively, is as satisfactory in their dia- 

 lects, as that yielded by the French, Spanish, and Italian, of 

 their common origin. 



It remains to consider hovv' the principal languages of Su- 

 matra and Java, the Malay and Javanese, came to be so 

 widely disseminated, as the theory Avhich I adopt supposes 

 them to have been, within the limited bounds of the Archi- 

 pelago, to which I first confine my examination. I have no 

 doubt the dissemination was effected, in the case of the lan- 

 guages of neighbouring tribes, by conquest, and in the more 

 remote, by piratical expeditions, terminating in conquest and 

 colonization ; by commerce, and, perhaps, in some small de- 

 gree, by religious agency. 



The nearest pai-allels to this, with which the European 

 reader is familiar, will be found in the piratical and commer- 

 cial expeditions, conquests, and colonizations of the ancient 

 Greeks, or the piratical expeditions, conquests, and settle- 

 ments, of the Scandinavian nations, known as Danes or 

 Normans. 



Even without the knowledge of the compass, the mon- 

 soons afford, to the nations of the Indian Archipelago, ex- 



