On the Indian Archipelago. 169 
of a new world. But with the fresh charms, the exaggerated 
impressions also of novelty wear away; and then, retracing our 
steps, we wonder that people so widely separated from the na- 
| tions of the West, both geographically and historically, and real- 
>> ly differing so much in their outward aspect, should, in their more 
latent traits, so much resemble them. 'The nearer we come to 
the inner spirit of humanity, the more points of agreement ap- 
pear, and this not merely in the possession of the universal attri- 
butes of human nature, but in specific habits, usages, and su- 
perstitions. , 
What at first seems stranger still is, that when we seek the na- 
tive of the Archipelago in the mountains of the interior, where 
he has lived for probably more than two thousand years secluded 
from all foreign influenee, and where we expect to fr all the 
differences at their maximum, wwe are sometimes astonished to 
find him approximating most closely of all to the European. In 
the Jakan, for instance, girded though his loins are with terap 
bark, and armed as he is with his sumpitan and poisoned arrows, 
we recognize the plain and clewnish manners and simple ideas of 
the uneducated peasant in the more secluded parts of European 
countries; and when he describes how, at his merry-makings, 
his neighbors assemble, the arrack tampui flows around an 
dance, in which both sexes mingle, is prolonged, till each seats 
himself on the ground with his partner on his knee and his bam- 
bi of arrack by his side, when the dance gives place to song, we 
‘are forcibly reminded of the free and jovial, if rude, manners of 
the lower rural classes of the West. Freed from the repellant 
prejudices and artificial trappings of Hindu and Mahomedan civ- 
ilization, we see in the man of the Archipelago moye that is akin 
than the reverse to the unpolished man of Europe. 
When we turn to the present political condition of the Archi- 
pelago, we are struck by the contrast which it presents to that 
which characterized it three or four centuries ago. ‘The mass of - 
the people, it is true, in all their private relations, remain in near- 
ly the same state in which they were found by the earliest Euro- 
- pean voyagers, and in which they had existed for many centuries 
