INHABITANTS OF THE OCEANIC REGIONS. 39 



At present the preponderating influence has passed to the peoples of Western 

 Europe. All these lands inhabited by Malays, Negritos, Papuans, Maoris, and other 

 Polynesians, belong politically to one or another European power, or are already 

 regarded as coming within their legitimate sphere of action or that of the United 

 States. Thus like Africa, the oceanic world is almost entirely parcelled out amongst 

 the Western nations. Commanding a thousand marine highways, including that 

 through the Isthmus of Suez created by themselves, these nations have far out- 

 stripped their Hindu, Arab, and Chinese forerunners in rapidity of action, material 

 strength, and dominant civilising influences, while still increasing their hold of 

 these regions at the very antipodes of the European world. 



In this political, commercial, and ethnical expansion of the cultured peoples of 

 the West, the foremost place belongs unquestionably to the Anglo-Saxon race, the 

 British and American branches of which seem destined jointly to absorb the whole 

 of the Pacific insular lands. The young but vigorous colonies of Australia and 

 New Zealand ma}^ be said already to constitute an oceanic Britain, forming a sort 

 of equilibrium with that of the Northern hemisphere, and serving as a sure founda- 

 tion for the future spread of the English language, social and political institutions, 

 throughout the Eastern seas, from Auckland Island to the Sandwich Archipelago, 

 from Torres Strait to Easter Island. 



The great ethnical divisions of the people occupying the oceanic region 

 correspond in a general way with the geographical distribution of the insular 

 groups themselves. Madagascar forms a little world of its own, where the Malay 

 immigrants, and the aborigines of African descent have alieady been merged in a 

 single nationality with absolute uniformity of speech. The Eastern Archipelago and 

 the Philijypines are mainly inhabited by the Malays, closely related to those of the 

 Asiatic peninsula to which they give their name. But amongst them still survive 

 isolated communities of different origin, dark and dwarfish peoples by manv 

 supposed to be of Dravidian or Kolarian stock. The Pelew, Marianne, Caroline, 

 and Marshall groups stretching north of the equator and of the Melanesian lands, 

 and to which the collective term Ilicronesia has been fittingly applied, offer a 

 mixture of races constituting an ethnical transition between the Malays, the Papuans, 

 and the natives of the smaller insular dependencies of Japan. Farther south the 

 expression Melanesia, indicating the black complexion of the great bulk of the 

 inhabitants, has been similarly applied to Papuasia, or New Guinea, with the adjoin- 

 ing groups of New Britain, New Ireland, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, and 

 the New Hebrides. 



Till recently the Australian continent also belonged to an aboriginal dark race 

 of homogeneous type, with scarcely a trace of Malay blood except here and there on 

 the north and north-west coastlands. Lastly all the eastern islands, from Hawaii 

 to New Zealand, constitute the watery domain of the large brown Polynesian race, 

 which also preserves a remarkable uniformity of type, except in Fiji and a few 

 other places, where it has been modified by intermixture with the aboriginal 

 Melanesian element. 



