XXI AUSTRALIAN AND POLYNESIAN RACES 471 



coast, either of shipwrecked Europeans or of some of the 

 higher and more civilized Malays, with possibly Arabs or 

 Chinese among them, and that, after maintaining themselves 

 for some time and leaving behind them the curious paint- 

 ings, carvings, and symmetrical stone heaps here described, 

 they have either been able to escape or have been ex- 

 terminated by the natives, leaving however behind them 

 some mixed descendants to puzzle the traveller by their 

 superior appearance. The remarkable costume of the 

 persons represented in the wall-paintings should give a clue 

 to the designers, and there is, so far as I know, only one not 

 very remote locality where a similar costume is in use — the 

 islands of Siau and Sanguir north of Celebes — but as these 

 people were converted to Christianity by the Portuguese, 

 those I saw at Menado perhaps wore an imitation of the 

 cassock of a Romish priest. It is just possible that some 

 Chinese Christians, converts of the early Jesuit missionaries, 

 may have been wrecked on this coast, and that the figures 

 may be due to their recollections of the images or pictures 

 of saints with haloes round their heads. But whoever the 

 people were v/ho executed these drawings it is quite certain 

 they were not Australians. 



The conclusion here reached, that the Australians, 

 though usually classed as one of the lowest forms of man- 

 kind now surviving, are really one of the primitive types 

 of the great Caucasian race to which we ourselves belong, 

 will appear to many of my readers to be improbable, or 

 even absurd. But I venture to think that it, nevertheless, 

 most nearly accords with, all the facts of the case; and 

 since it has been admitted that some of the darkest 

 Hindoos are nearly allied to Europeans, there is less im- 

 probability in the existence of some more archaic and less 

 developed forms of the same fundamental type. It also 

 accords with all we are now learning of the vast antiquity 

 of the human race, since if all the peoples now living upon 

 the earth can be classed in one or other of the three great 

 divisions of mankind — Negroid, Mongolian, and Caucasian 

 — or as probable mixtures of them, we are impressed with 

 the conviction that we must go back to periods as com- 



