Jan. 13, 18S1] 



NA TURE 



H7 



THE INDO-CHINESE AND OCEANIC RACES- 

 TYPES AND AFFINITIES^ 

 III. 



IN the accompanying series of illustrations the late King 

 ofCamboja (Fig. 14) and the Sticng of the forest region 

 east of the .Me-Khong, between i2°-i3° N. lat. (Fig. 15), 

 may 1 e compared, on the one hand, with the famous 

 statue of the leprous king, Bua-Sivi^i Miwong (Fig. 16), 

 the traditional builder of the temple of ( Jngkor-V'aht, and 

 on the other with the first King of Siam and his late 

 Queen (Figs. 17 and 18). Here the resemblance of P'igs. 

 14, 15, 16 to the European type and difference from the 

 Mongoloid Siamese (17 and 18) is too obvious to need 

 further comment. For these illustrations from Mouhoi's 

 " Travels in Siam, &c.," I am indebted to the courtesy of 

 the publishers, Messrs. Murray, Albemarle Street. 



The Caucasian element in Indo-China differs from the 

 Mongoloid quite as much in speech as it does in other 

 respects. Here the Mongol races, as already stated, all 

 speak monosyllabic toned languages ; but the Cambojans 

 and kindred peoples all speak polysyllabic untoned lan- 

 guages, a fact scarcely yet recognised even by the best- 

 informed philologists. Taking the Khmer as the typical 

 language of this group, it will be convenient here to 

 establish its polysyllabic character, reserving the question 

 of its true affinities till we come to the allied races of 

 Malaysia and Polynesia. The so-called monosyllabic or 

 isolating family of languages — Chinese, Tibetan, Anna- 

 mese, Siamese, Laos, Khasia, Shan, Burmese, Khyeng, 

 Karen, Talaing, Kuki, and most of the innumerable 

 Himalayan dialects — must all be regarded as at present 

 reduce 1 to a state of profound phonetic decay. Whether 

 originally they were all essentially monosyllabic, pos- 

 sessing, like the Aryan, roots of one syllable only, it is 

 very difficult to say ; but it seems certain that they were 

 not originally toned. In fact there can be no reasonable 

 doubt that the tones are a later development, worked out 

 unconsciously to preserve distinctions between words that 

 had assumed the same- form by loss of initial or final 

 letters. Thus in Chinese the final letters ni, k, t, p have 

 disappeared in the correct Mandarin dialect, causing roots 

 like l-oii!,kok, hot, hop all to assume the form of ko, toned 

 four different ways according to the sense. 



This principle, which, combined wi'h the absence of 

 inflection or root modification, constitutes the very 

 essence of the monosyllabic system, pervades the whole 

 family. But it is absolutely un'.nown in the Khmer group, 

 in which words, whether monosyllables or polysyllables, 

 are always uttered without intonation, as in all other 

 languages. Its polysyllabic character was not recognised 

 by Francis Garnier, but it has been abundantly demon- 

 strated by Bouillevaux and Aynionnier, and will be made 

 evident further on. But because the Cambojans are of 

 Caucasian, and their speech of polysyllabic, type, it does not 

 follow that the Cambojan must be an Aryan language. As 

 already pointed out, within the Caucasian ethnical, there are 

 several fundamentally distinct linguistic groups, which are 

 now past reconciliation. To attempt toalflliate Cambojan 

 with Sanskrit must necessarily end in failure, as did 

 Bopp's attempt to include the " Malayo-Polynesian" in 

 the .-^ryan family. It must always be remembered that 

 man is at least a quaternary, if not a tertiary animal, 

 consequently that human speech is probably several 

 hundred thousand years old. This period has been too 

 short to evolve more than perhaps three or four really 

 distinct physical types, but it has been long enough to 

 evolve perhaps hundreds of really distinct linguistic types, 

 many now e.xtinct, some lingering on in contracted areas 

 and remote corners, several, like the Sorb of Lusatia and 

 the Pyrenean Basque, actually dying out, some few, like 

 the Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and especially English, 

 absorbing most of the rest, and threatening to divide the 

 world between them. 



* Continued from p. 224. 



B.— CAUCASIAN TYPE— (C(7«//««.'<0 



V. Oceanic Branch : Indonesian and Sawaiori, or 

 Eas/t-rn Polynesian Groups. 



All the Oceanic peoples, other than the dark races of 

 Class A, are commonly grouped together under the col- 

 lective term ''Malayo-Polynesian." liy this name are 

 consequently understood all the yellow, brown, or olive- 

 brown inhabitants of Malaysia and the Indian and Pacific 

 Oceans, that is to say, all varieties of Malays in Malacca 

 and the Dutch East Indies, the Malagasy of Madagascar, 

 the Philippine Islanders, the Micronesians, the natives of 

 Formosa and the large brown Eastern Polynesians. The 

 expression was originally proposed by William von Hum- 

 boldt, merely in a linguistic sense, to designate the group 

 of fundamentally connected languages, which really prevail 

 amongst all these widely diffused peoples. But, like 

 Aryan and so many other similar terms, it gradually 

 acquired an ethnical meaning, and moat ethnologists now 

 t.ake it for granted that there is a Malayo-Polynesian race, 

 as there is a Malayo-Polynesian speech. But such is not 

 the case, and as on the mainland, so in the Oceanic area, 

 the presence of the two distinct Caucasian and Mongolian 

 types must be recognised and carefully distinguished. It 

 seems hopeless to do this as long as the misguiding ex- 

 pression Malayo-Polynesian continues to figure in scientific 

 writings. While retaining Malay for the typical olive-brown 

 Mongolian element in the Eastern Archipelago, I have 

 elsewhere proposed Indo-Pacific for the brown Caucasian 

 element in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and Sawaiori 

 for the large brown Polynesians, constituting the eastern 

 and niOst important branch of that element. 



It has already been remarked that the Caucasians are 

 the true autochthones of Indo-China. They seem to 

 have also preceded the Mongol migration to the Archi- 

 pelago, no doubt driven thither by the continual pressure 

 of the Mongols advancing southwards and eastwards 

 from High Asia. In the Archipelago they occupied 

 chieflv the large islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Gilolo, and 

 Celebes, here probably exterminating the aboriginal 

 Negrito tribes. But here also they were followed by 

 the Mongols from the mainland, with whom some amal- 

 gamated, producing the present mixed races of Western 

 Malaysia, while others migr.ited eastwards to their pre- 

 sent homes in the Easiern Pacific. Here they occupy 

 almost exclusively all the islands east of a line running 

 from Hawaii through Samoa to New Zealand, those 

 groups included. West of that line they are found mostly 

 blended with the Melanesians, as explained in Section II., 

 but al,o in a pure state at a few isolated spots such as 

 the Ellice and Phcenix Islands, Rotuma and Uvea in the 

 Loyalty group. They are also found blended with the 

 Malay and other elements in Micronesia. 



That this large brown race reached the Pacific from 

 the west there can be no reasonable doubt, and this view 

 is now consequently held by Hale, Flower, Whitmee, de 

 Quatrefages, and most recent ethnologists. F. Miiller 

 and de Ouatrefages have even identified their legendary 

 Piilotu, or Western Island of the Blest, with Hiiro in 

 Malaysia, which x-, accordingly taken as their probable 

 starting-point. But from whatever place they set out, 

 they seem to have settled first in Samoa, which may 

 therefore be taken as their second point of dispersion. 

 " From this centre, and more particularly from the Island 

 of Savaii, the principal of the group, their further migra- 

 tions may be traced with some certainty from archipelago 

 to archipelago through the uniform traditions of the 

 various groups. In these traditions Savaii' is constantly 



1 This word Savaii has by some been identified with Java. But the 

 primitive form teems und mbtedly to have been Savaiki, in which both 

 s and k aie organic. On the other hand Ja\a is tne Sanskrit Yavak 

 i ,T I'^iavah. ['le two-stalked barley, w^-ere the in tial organic is (/, dropped 

 ,is in t'le I iiHi 7.1".'/; t r Dianiis (re. rf/ol Besides, although there 

 krr in.iny S .n,l<i I w .r 1~ in th; Malay dialects, there are none in the 

 S nva II i. tie L' iiti'a ;,i.is h.ivir .'4 niisratrd eastwards 1 ng before the appear- 

 anre of the Hindus in t'le Aruh-iclaKO. Hence a'tli. ugh they may have 



