INTRODUCTION 13 
Behind and below all the foregoing is the native East 
Indian or Malaysian core of primitive culture with 
which the Filipinos must have begun their career. This 
kernel or substratum is preserved in its purest form 
among the inland mountaineers of northern Luzon, the 
largest island in the archipelago. This group of tribes, 
sometimes designated collectively under the name 
Igorot, were less affected than any others by Hindu in- 
fluences. Mohammedanism did not reach them at all, 
and Christianity mainly in its economic aspects and at 
that chiefly at the fringes. By subtracting from their 
life, as it has survived to the present day, whatever 
can be recognized as Hindu in origin, we obtain a fairly 
definite picture of what the older Filipino and Malay- 
sian culture must have been. On matching this picture 
with that presented by the more advanced tribes, we 
can recognize what is primitive among the latter; and 
find it to be no inconsiderable element. The constitu- 
tion of society, the relations of man to man within the 
group, and of group to group, are still essentially of the 
pre-Christian and pre-Hindu type over most of the 
Philippines. 
Here our positive knowledge ends. There should be 
another chapter to the story, because we know that 
another stratum of culture must have underlain the 
early Malaysian one. We know this because there are 
remnants of a population that is distinct from the 
Malaysians and must have preceded it. In several of 
the Philippine islands there survive some thousands of 
small, broad-nosed, curly-haired, black people,—Negri- 
tos, “‘little blacks,” the Spaniards called them, and the 
name has remained with them. Physically, they are 
fundamentally of a different type from the brown, 
lanky-haired Malaysian whose affinities are Mongo- 
loid. So distinctive, in fact, are the two races that it is 

