1884. | Geography and Travels. 173 
at a distance of five or six miles, thus forming safe anchorages. 
The interior here consists of ranges of rolling grassy hills with 
scattered eucalyptus, acacia, etc., interspersed with streams, and 
contains tracts well fitted for sugar and other tropical crops. 
Beyond is the Owen Stanley range 13,000 feet high. The rocks 
of this range appear to be the same as the Devonian and Silurian 
series of the New South Wales gold-fields. The central moun- 
tains of the northwest peninsula, the Arfak, seem mainly granite 
and gneiss. Though severe earthquakes occur on the north 
coast, no active volcanoes have yet been found. 
The level of civilization among the isolated tribes of Papuans 
varies greatly. Some are skillful and industrious cultivators, but 
their plants and their agriculture appear to have come from Asia. 
Cannibalism is not common, and is, perhaps, mainly confined to 
wartime. The spirit of the dead ancestor is supposed to enter 
into his image or Karwar, so that a man would rather part with 
the skull than with the image of his father. This ancestor wor- 
ship is the principal part of their religion. They show a marked 
feeling for art in the ornamentation of their houses, weapons, 
tools, etc. They are a rude, boisterous, independent people, with 
a keen sense of their rights, not only in the soil, but in the fruits 
of the forest trees, and in the fish of the streams belonging to the 
tribe. Though the Malay custom of building the houses on piles 
's general, some are also built on the ground, or high up in trees. 
The eastern peninsula is partly occupied by a fairer and milder 
race, with Polynesian affinities, but with a religion even more 
rudimentary than the Papuan. The people of the north coast 
generally are finer than those of the south, perhaps through. 
intercourse and intermingling with the emigration passing from 
Sia to the Pacific, while the people of the south coast have had 
relations mainly with the inferior Australians. Hereditary rank 
'S not a Papuan conception, and the power of the chiefs is small. 
be Malay rulers of the small islands Bachian, Gébé and Tidore 
D e, since the fifteenth century, laid claim to New Guinea. The 
utch base their claims on those of the last, as their suzerainty, and 
Guin annexed the western part as far as 140° 47’ E. long. New 
ts €a was actually discovered by the Portuguese or Spaniards in 
Races” and by the time of Torres most of the outline was roughly 
i SOUTHERN CHINESE.—It would seem, from the- facts 
by Sat together in a paper read before the British Association 
the a3 H. S. Hallett, that the claim of the Chinese Emperor to 
icc of Tonquin and Annam may be regarded as the 
3 Of a once real, though now obsolete right. 
2356, s inese Emperor Yaou, who came to the throne B. C. 
> Sent the tribe of Hi to take possession of the country to the 
Tong of the Yangtsi. Kingdoms thus formed extended south of 
un, B. C. 2208. The Annamite and Shan kingdoms were 
