268 JOSHUA RUTLAND, ESQ., ON 
the capabilities of the island for supporting a large popula- 
tion, the inhabitants have remained singularly low in the 
social scale. At the commencement of the present century 
their language had not been reduced to writing. Though 
they possessed the arts indispensable to civilized com- 
munities, such as agriculture, pottery, weaving, and the 
working of metals, all were of the rudest or most primitive 
fashion. The population of Madagascar, as far back as our 
information extends, has been divided into tribes constantly 
at war with each other. Amongst these tribes no one was 
conspicuously superior until the recent rise of the Hovas, 
which was probably due to the highlands they occupy being 
better adapted for European residents who influenced them 
than the malarious districts of the coast. 
Throughout the great island only one language was 
spoken. Though the tribes had different customs, their arts 
were everywhere similar, merely varying according to the 
physical conditions of the districts they occupied. As in the 
population of Eastern Polynesia, amongst the Malagasy two 
distinct types, one negroid, the other Asiatic, were per- 
ceptible. The Rev, William Ellis, whose long residence in 
the Society Islands and the Hawaiian archipelago and care- 
ful observation of the inhabitants enabled him to compare 
them with the Malagasy, shortly after his arrival at Tamatave 
in 1856 remarked:—“ I was much struck with the perfect 
identity of the Malagasy and the Eastern Polynesians, in the 
names of many of the things most common to both. One of 
these was a cocoa-nut tree, and to my surprise they 
pronounced the name precisely as a South Sea Islander 
would have done. The same was the case with the 
Pandanus oy Vacoua, one of the most common trees on the 
coast both of Madagascar and Tahiti; also the word for 
flower, and the names of several parts of the human body. 
The numerals were also, with but slight variation, identically 
the same. The discovery of this resemblance between the 
languages spoken by two communities so widely separated 
from each other, besides seeming to point out the source 
whence Madagascar had derived at least part of its present 
population, promised me great facility in acquiring their 
language.” Though the effects of Arab intercourse are 
plainly discernible in the arts and customs of the Malagasy, 
when the Europeans discovered the island the sumpitan or 
blowing pipe was one of their weapons, and bark cloth was 
not entirely superseded by the coarse woven fabric made 
