178 Negroes of the Indian Archipelago. 



hair, which has procured them the name of Mop-headed 

 Indians." 



There are fifteen different varieties of oriental negroes, of 

 eleven of which we have good descriptions. Some of them 

 are feeble dwarfs under five feet, and others are powerful 

 men. To include the whole under one category, is surely 

 contrary to truth and nature. 



As far as language can be considered a test of race, and 

 as the present state of our knowledge on the subject will 

 enable us to judge, it goes to prove that all the tribes or 

 nations of whose languages we possess examples, are sepa- 

 rate and distinct from each other. I have compared the 

 words of nine negro languages. Three of these consist of 

 the few words of Mallicolo, Tanna, and New Caledonia, given 

 by Foster in his Observations on Cook's Second Voyage, and 

 six of fifty-five words of the Saman of the Malay peninsula, 

 from my own collection, and those of the Gebe, Waigyn, 

 New Guinea, and New Ireland, and Vanikoro, the scene of 

 the wreck of La Perouse, from that of H. Gaimard. 



An examination of these comparative vocabularies corrects 

 an error of very general acceptance, that the negro lan- 

 guages contain no Malay words ; for each of the nine contains 

 Malay words. The proportion of Malay words is consider- 

 able in the languages of those tribes which are nearest to 

 the Malays, and therefore most amenable to Malayan in- 

 fluence, and diminishes in proportion to distance or other 

 difficulty of communication. Excluding the numerals, which 

 in most cases are Malayan, the proportion in a hundred 

 words of the Saman is twelve ; in the Gebe about eight ; in 

 the Waigyu above five; in the Doree Harbour of New Guinea, 

 near four ; in the Port Carteret of New Ireland six ; and in 

 the Vanikoro little more than three. The greater number 

 of Malayan words in all these negro languages consist of 

 nouns or names of physical objects, and none of them can be 

 said to be essential to the grammatical structure. They are, 

 in fact, substantially extrinsic. 



A comparison of the native words of the negro languages 

 themselves shews that they agree in a very small number 

 of cases, where the tribes speaking them are in the vicinity 



