70 HILL TRIBES OF FORMOSA. 
island. Craniologists alone would be able to trace the section 
of the human family to which they belong, but I should be 
inclined to doubt if they decided that all the various tribes. num- 
bering, I should think, over one hundred, spread over a wild and 
mountainous country some two hundred miles long by fifty to sixty 
miles in its broadest part, were descended from one pure stock. I 
have, for many years, held the opinion that the hill tribes are 
descended from a mixture of sources, but chiefly Malayan. It is 
very probable that the earliest inhabitants of this island were of 
an Indian type—short in stature, but not very dark-skinned—the 
descendants of a very ancient race, the origin of which is lost in 
obscurity. Subsequently, the Malayan element must have appeared, 
many centuries ago, for the Malays were found by the Spaniards as 
far North as the Philippines as early as a.p. 1521, at which date 
the principal islands were almost entirely occupied by them, and 
it is very likely that those islands, as well as Formosa, had been 
colonised by them many hundred of years before. 
The variots dialects spoken, especially in the Southern half of 
the island, lead one to suppose that the Formosan Hill Tribes are 
descended from several sources. 
Some of the dialects contain undoubtedly words of Malayan 
origin, but the bulk of them do not resemble, as far as I have been 
able to ascertain, any language spoken in the East, and although 
there are many Chinese words now in use amongst the tribes 
residing on the Western border-land, such words are only used to 
describe articles obtained from Chinese hillmen, for which these 
border savages have no names. 
It is generally supposed by those who have carefully observed 
the hill savages called Chin Wans that they are not direct descend- 
ants of Chinese, for they do not resemble Chinese of the present 
day in any point, except perhaps in the high cheek-bone, which 
many of them have, in common with Malays, Siamese, Japanese 
and other Eastern races. In many savage tribes in the North of For- 
mosa—and all our remarks refer to them—prominent cheek-bones 
are not the rule, but the exception, and the contour of the face and 
the small round-shaped head at once prcclaim them to be children 
of another race. Their eyes, which are straight cut. have a widely 
