THE ISLANDS AND THEIR POPULATION 31 
devise an efficient political organization and _ stable 
government for himself, there is no doubt that his indus- 
trial mechanisms, combined with the fertility of his 
country, would have enabled him to become, even in the 
pre-European period, several times more populous than 
he was at his discovery. 
Black Peoples: The Negritos. The Negrito, the 
earliest inhabitant of the Philippines, is a most peculiar 
type of humanity. He is black in the sense in which the 
African Negro is black, and his hair is thick, short, and 
woolly. He can and often does grow a full beard, and his 
trunk bears a perceptible coating of body hair. His 
jaws protrude, but the face tapers to a narrow chin. His 
head is well rounded, its width averaging almost exactly 
five-sixths of the length. The nose is extremely broad: 
there are about as many individuals in which the trans- 
verse diameter of this organ exceeds its greatest length, 
as the reverse. This is of course a Negroid trait. 
But the most marked characteristic of the Negrito, 
that which has earned him his name and suffices to set 
him off sharply from all true Negroes, is his diminutive 
stature. He is truly a pygmy, with an average height 
equivalent to that of a thirteen year old American boy. 
Nearly every group that has been measured shows a 
stature of appreciably less than 150 ecm., or five feet. 
The women, of course, are proportionally shorter. The 
single known group of Negrito affinity which runs a few 
inches taller, the Mamanua of Mindanao, may be 
assumed to have acquired its increased stature through 
intermixture with Malaysian neighbors. At the same 
time, the Negrito is in no sense a dwarf, nor does he 
ordinarily make the impression of being an essentially 
underfed and stunted variety of man. The head is not 
disproportionately large, and the body in general is 
neatly and cleanly symmetrical. 
