2 THE PIGMIES. 



particulars gathered by a few travellers, which unfortunately come 

 to very little. 



Of all the languages spoken by Negritos the most interesting to 

 Btudy would unquestionably be that of the Mincopies. Owing to the 

 almost complete isolation in which these islanders have lived, espe- 

 cially in the Great Andaman group, ( l ) their dialects can only have 

 been altered through natural evolution and independently of foreign 

 influence. This language goes back certainly to remote antiquity 

 and lias probably preceded those now spoken in Malacca, Siam 

 and in India itself. The study of it would consequently be of the 

 greatest interest, as well from an ethnological as from a linguistical 

 point of view. 



Mr. E. H. Man seems to have understood it so. Before him, 

 Symes, Colebrooke, RoErsTOitFF, Teckel, &c, had confined 

 themselves to gathering short vocabularies. ( 2 ) Brought into 

 daily communication with the natives, in the course of his official 

 duties, Mr. Man" learned their languages. He translated in one of 

 them the Lord's Prayer, which was published with a commentary 



races are able to bear long- fasting and also to consume at one meal a prodigi- 

 ous quantity of fool. The Mincopies, who alone seem to have been studied 

 at aU from a p ithological point of view, suffer mostly from diseases contracted 

 from the habit, to which I shall refer hereafter, of clothing themselves, 

 bo bo speak, with mud. Pulmonary consumption did not exist in the Anda- 

 mans, but a few natives who came to European settlements were very soon 

 afflicted with it. This would tend to confirm what I have repeatedly said, 

 namely that we ourselves have imported the disease into various parts of the 

 world where it was unknown before. (Les Pol// /tea tens et leurs Migrations et 

 Journal des Savants, 1873). M. MONTANO found, in one single Manthra family, 

 two individuals afflicted one with the rickets, the other with epilepsy. (Quel- 

 ques jours chez las indigenes de la province de Malacca : Rente d' JEt/mographw, 

 Vo'. I. p. -I lie appears to consider as a general rule and what he saw 



Beemed to him to show Itow u race dies out. But the groups seen by M. 

 MoNTANO must be the exception. LOGAN, at all events, mentions nothing 

 of the kind and appears, on the contrary, to assign to these populations a 

 vitality capable of resisting the unfavourable conditions to which conquest 

 has subjected them. CI he Binva of Jolwre ; The Journal of the Indian 

 ipelago, Vol. I, passim). 



(l) In my first Etude sur les Mincopies et la Rice Negrito en general, I have 

 mention d I te fact that signs of cross-breeding have been found in Little An- 

 daman, a nth of the othei islands. (Revue d' Anthropologic, Vol. 1, p. 213. J 



(a) I have borrowed from these various writers some of the examples 

 b sec mad most suited to show clearly the variety of Mincopie dialects, 

 first pointed to by Mr. Fbancis Day. (Etude sur les Mincopies, p. 191.) 



