218 ON THE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE 



own faults by offering the heads of strangers to the 

 chiefs of their villages, are probably of the same 

 description. 



The Papuas, termed by themselves Igolote, but by 

 the Spaniards of th^ P/iilippines, negritos del monte, 

 from their colour and woolly hair, are the second race 

 of aborigines, in the eastern isles ; in several of which 

 they are still to be found, and in all of which they 

 seem to have originally existed. Some of their 

 divisions have formed small savage states, and made 

 some advances towards civilization ; but the greater 

 part of them, even with the example of more civil- 

 ized races before their eyes, have betrayed no symp- 

 toms, either of a taste or capacity for improvement, 

 and continue in their primitive state of nakedness, 

 sleeping on trees, devoid of houses or cloathing, and 

 subsisting on the spontaneous products of the forest, 

 or the precarious success of their hunting and 

 fishing. The natives of the Andaman isles seem to 

 be of this race, as also the black mountaineer tribes 

 of the Malay peninsula, termed at Kiddeh^ Samang ; 

 Sit PeraJc, and in the Malay countries to the N. W. 

 of Kiddeh, Bila ; while to the southward of Perdk, 

 and through the straits of Malacca, to the eastward, 

 they are termed Dayah. The Papuas, or oriental 

 negroes, seem to be all divided into very small states 

 or rather societies, very little connected with each 

 other. Hence their language is broken into a mul- 

 .titude of dialects, which in process of time, by sepa- 

 ration, accident, and oral corruption, have nearly lost 

 all resemblance. The Malays of the peninsula, con- 

 sider the language of the blacks of the hills as a mere 

 jargon, which can only be compared to the chattering 

 of large birds ; and the Papua dialects, in many of the 

 eastern isles, are generally viewed in the same light. 



