232 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



Sometimes varying to yellowish-brown, it is in color sooty- 

 black; in stature often so diminutive, that the small heads they 

 have appear large, the more in disproportion, because the 

 mities arc feeble and slender. Such at least is the case 

 with many of the tribes still possessed of retreats in the Malay 

 Archipelago and Peninsula; but this form of the woolly-haired 

 stock, unlike the African, diminishes rapidly before th< 

 croachments of Malays, Arabs, and Europeans. Many of them 

 prefer death to slavery; others vegetate in that condition, their 

 marriages not producing more than one or two children; and 

 some, becoming Mahometans, form mixed populations, where 

 Horafoura and Malay, Hindoo and Arab, Chinese and Euro- 

 pean, have been promiscuously mixed, and their characteristics 

 obliterated. In this way Western Asiatic nations, with more 

 undulating or lank hair, were likewise formed, by intermixture 

 with the low-fronted Dombuks, Nimreks, and Kakasiah, or 

 black brothers. They may have influenced even the black 

 Kahnuks, the Colchians of Herodotus, and the black Bedou- 

 eens. 



From the geographical position of the purest Papua Negroes, 

 it is evident that they have been the first race expelled the 

 coasts and plains, since they are insulated in the mountains, or 

 driven to the unhealthy equatorial points, where other tribes 

 cannot multiply. Hence, they are the oldest primaeval race, 

 even if it should be denied that they are a population of ante- 

 rior date to a great territorial cataclysis, which submerged a 

 continent beneath or on the south of the line. It is also 

 evident, that around them, and northward, up the Indus, to the 

 southern foot of the Himalayas, the (Nishada) most ancient 

 nations, with some relation to the distance from their equatorial 

 centre, bear strong marks, in structure, intellectual capacity, 

 habits, color, and hair, of a succession of intermixtures with 

 r?.:<?s coming down by the gorge of the Brahmaputra, and along 

 the eastern secondaries of the great mountain range, causing a 

 Mongolic adulteration ; and, on the north-west, by the Cabul 



