184 
MULLER ON NEW GUINEA. 
[March 22 , 1858 . 
two particulars. He spoke of the Jura chalk : it is what we call in English the 
oolitic series of limestone. All the southern coasts seem to be occupied by 
tertiary formations, which, like the tegel of Vienna, are probably younger 
than our London clay. What the interior may consist of, it will be, as 
the translator said, an object of great interest for British travellers to 
determine. 
Mr. Crawfurd. — I do not take quite so sanguine a view of the advantages 
to be gained by a knowledge of New Guinea as Mr. Yeats does. It is the 
largest island in the world except Borneo, for we are not in the habit of con- 
sidering Australia an island at all, but a great continent. At the same time, 
although Providence no doubt had wise objects in view in creating such an 
island, I believe it to be, as far as we know, the most useless large portion of 
the globe. From Mr. Yeats’s own statement it is covered over with an 
immense jungle ; it does not contain a single animal useful to man, except a 
few that have been imported, the hog and the dog. I shall mention a fact 
interesting to geologists, in comparing it with another island at a short distance. 
The island that I allude to is Bali ; with an area of only about one-hundred- 
and-twentieth part of that of New Guinea, it contains a population of 
900,000 inhabitants. I would, venture to say that the entire country of New 
Guinea does not contain so many. The inhabitants of New Guinea are in 
an exceedingly rude state. With respect to its vegetable productions, I am 
not aware of any of value to commerce except one — the aromatic nutmeg, which 
it produces in considerable abundance. There are one or two other small 
articles consumed by the natives of the western part of the Archipelago as a 
cosmetic. New Guinea is the native country of the birds of paradise, of which 
there are five or six species. It also produces that magnificent bird the 
crown pigeon, and it is the only part of the world that does so. The western 
part of the island has for a long time been subject to a very small island, one 
of the Spice Islands, now under the protection of the Dutch. The people of the 
Spice Islands, through the means of a commerce in spices before the arrival of 
Europeans in India, attained a considerable degree of power and civilization, 
and they absolutely made a conquest of a very large portion of the western 
coast of the great island of New Guinea. The President has alluded to some 
acquaintance I have with the languages in that part of the world. I heard the 
word “ Papua ” for example mentioned : that ought to be pronounced “ puwa- 
puwa.” It means frizzly or woolly. When the natives of the Indian Archi- 
pelago talk of the land of New Guinea, they call it Tanah orang-punea-punea ; 
that means the land of the men with woolly heads. With respect to the 
inhabitants, 1 believe the country is peopled by the same race of negroes 
throughout. Being found universally so by the Portuguese, and thinking 
they bore a strong resemblance to the natives of Guinea, they called the land 
New Guinea. This people is to be found in our own colonies as slaves. I 
have seen them in Java and at Singapore as slaves. They are very robust, 
active men, very little short of the strength of negroes on the Guinea coast of 
Africa. They are by no means the same as the negroes found in other parts 
of the East. These last begin at the Andaman, a group of islands in lat. 15° 
and 16°, in the middle of the Bay of Bengal, where a race of small negroes is 
found not exceeding 4 feet 8 inches high. I have seen a few of them, but not 
in the Andamans ; people take care not to land there, for the natives are a 
mischievous little set. Then, again, we have in the Malay peninsula a very 
small race ; I will not say, however, the very same that is found in the Andaman 
Islands. In four of the great islands of the Philippine Archipelago we have 
them again in considerable numbers. But they are not to be found in the 
great islands of Java, Borneo, and Sumatra. They are, indeed, very capri- 
ciously distributed. We find them next in New Guinea and in all the little 
islands bordering its western side. From that point they extend continuously 
