m THE MALAY PENINSULA. 45 



but whether the connection is one of languag-e — affinity or mere 

 contact must for the present at least be left an open question. 



After making- all these deductions and rejecting-, if not 

 absolutely, at any rate for the time being", the inferences of race — 

 identity and linguistic relationship which one mig-ht be tempted 

 to draw from the somewhat scanty materials now under con- 

 sideration, a real historical conclusion remains: there is evidence, 

 that is to. say, of the strong- influence of some Mon-Annam form 

 of speech on the dialects of the Peninsular aborig-ines; and it is 

 obvious that such influence cannot have been exercised without 

 direct social contact of some kind or other. The low state of 

 culture of the jungle-tribes entirely precludes the idea of a 

 literary influence comparable to that of Greek on Eng-lish, and it 

 follows that if not themselves of Mon-Annam stock, and many 

 of them certainly are not, they must have been in direct contact 

 with a race that was. 



We have seen too, that even the Negrito tribes of the North 

 and th-e mixed Malayan tribes of the South show the impress of 

 the same influence; and it is noticeable that the Mon-Annam 

 element, though seemingly strongest in the Sakai, is considerable 

 in the Negrito Semang, and appears to exist in varying propor- 

 tions, even in the dialects of the mixed Malayan tribes of the 

 south of the Peninsula : we are therefore driven almost irresistibly 

 to the conclusion that it must have been due to direct contact 

 with a superior and as we may fairly infer, a politically dominant 

 race. There must have been a time, that is to say, when the 

 ancestors of the present jungle-men of the Peninsula were held 

 in subjection by an Indo-Chinese race of the Mon-Annam family, 

 and it seems probable that such a race at some time or other 

 held sway in the Peninsula itself. The only other alternative 

 is to suppose that the so-called aborigines, after having been 

 subjected to Mon-Annam influences in Indo-China, wandered 

 down to their present haunts at a later period. That is a view 

 consistent perhaps with the imperfect linguistic evidence at 

 present available ; but apart from the intrinsic improbability of 

 a relatively recent migration of several independent and distin-.t 

 races from Indo-China into the Peninsula, it is to be observed 

 that the Mon-Annam stock was in former daj^s dominant o^er 

 a far more extended tract of country than would now seem 

 probable if one judged merely by its present comparative 



