82 REV. M, EELLS, ON THE WORSHIP AND TRADITIONS OP 



the Tertiary man, and the nearest allied to the Pithecanthropos, 

 leads me to suppose that he was some man, driven from his tribe, 

 who perished alone and uncared for. The case of a corpse being 

 so neglected as to become fossilised in such a manner would 

 only occur where the deceased had died among strangers, or had 

 been driven forth as a dangerous lunatic, which last his skull 

 would lead us to suppose he was. 



In ancient kitchen-middens in the Andamans I have found the 

 lowest strata of such an age as to be fossilised (and this in the 

 absence of streams of water, or of any marked silicious deposit), 

 but these fossils have never been imbedded in the late Tertiary 

 strata of which these islands are composed, and I have never seen 

 any fossil skulls, etc. This matter is still, however, under 

 investigation. 



At any rate the PUhecanthropos gives us another reason to 

 believe in the exceeding age of the human race, and makes it 

 more difficult to dogmatise as to its place of origin. 



My own views regarding the Pacific Islands are, that many of 

 them are not part of a submerged continent, but are isolated 

 creations by volcanic action. 



I think that the inter-tropic region of Asia and Australia, 

 including much of Polynesia, and extending to Tasmania, was, in 

 the late Tertiary period, inhabited by a Negrito race, the traces of 

 which are now only found in the Tasmanians (lately extinct), the 

 Andamanese, the Semangs, the Aetas, and as Monsieur Dieulafoy 

 has shown, in a hybrid state in a few other places. 



The hills of the north prevented this race extending in that 

 direction, and it was gi-adually exterminated by the Mongoloid 

 and Polynesian races Avhicli have succeeded it. The Papuans and 

 Solomon Islanders, among others, appear to me to be hybrid 

 Negrito-Polynesian people, and I find isolated cases of Negrito 

 customs and manufactures in many islands in the neiglibourhood 

 of New Guinea. 



Other remarks in this paper to which, after a close study of 

 savages on the spot, for many years, I take exception, are as 

 follows : — 



1. "It must be remembered also, that the ancient inhabitants of 

 some of these islands, although comparatively not very distant 

 from parts of Asia, are among the lowest and most degraded 

 people in the world, as the Dyaks of Borneo, celebrated as 



