THE F.THlfOLOQY Op THK INDIAN ARCHIPELAOO. 



races. I shall endeavour to supply for a few of the Indonesian 

 tribes those facta which I hare pointed om as essential for the 

 ethnology of every region (anfe, page 264.) I have Hclected for 

 this more ample enquiry the Bugis of tylebes, the K aha van? of 

 Borneo, the Batt&s of Sumatra and the Phiiipine islauders". The 

 great Javanese and Malayan races will, I have reason to belief e, 

 soon receive further illustration from Mr Crawfurd, whose fami- 

 liarity with the Archipelago, profound knowledge of the languages 

 of these races, and genius for comparative philology, render him 

 of all men the best qualified for the task. 



That I may not raise too high expectations of succeeding in 

 many of the enquiries which our review will necessarily suggest, let 

 us advert briefly to the difficulties of the subject. When we view 

 the ethnic history of the world as a whole, we are impressed with a 

 conviction thai our knowledge of it embraces only recent periods. 

 No rude unlettered nation can go back with any .ecuracy many 

 centuries or even generations, save those few which systematically 

 preserve genealogies ; and the many discrepancies and great blanks 

 Hi the best 01 these, the Hebrew and the Arabian, prove how little 

 they can be depended upon. Before the art of writing was dis- 

 covered or adopted in S.W. Asia, the tribes located there, although 

 considerably advanced, must have been in the same position as 

 other unlettered tribes were then and are at present, We only 

 shift our position by going back to the verge of the use of letters 

 by any tribe, or by the tribe which first discovered them. Looking 

 "i it we see the same MUSMI of ignorance ami sjfQf 

 regarding the past, that now prevail in rude tribes, prevailing then 

 over that tribe and over all the world. Every thing is Tost in 

 darkness. At the remotest period to which authentic his ton can 

 anywhere reach, the same phenomena meet us, so that we nave, 

 1st, a historic, and, 2nd, a prehistoric or archaic em. li v,: 

 in the historic time all that is authentically recorded, graphically 

 or traditionally, and in die archaic all that can be positively proved 

 by the evidence of customs, arts, &c, we must recognize a more 

 remote or primordial period, anterior to the development of the 

 civilisation in which these customs arose, but to which we can give 

 a certain embodiment by the evidence of language. Of the dura- 

 tion of even the archaic era ethnology can tell us nothing positive. 

 It tells us however that it must have been great, and, we should 

 naturally be led to conclude, far greater than that of the historic 

 period, because at the dawning of the latter, we find that every 

 considerable nation of the higher historic antiquity had already 

 assumed a fixed location and form. 



These two great eihnic eras wy in different regions. The 



preserres records of the earliest Inhabitants of a region after they themselcw have 

 afaafMared. 1 n It ujnbold t'» Euskarib n and Prichard'i Critic naearcbM it yielded 

 re*nlta of the greaust interest, and from the peculiar character of the athnology ot- 

 itic Archipelago h h here likely to prove of more than ordinary import-jace. 



