the present condition of 
12 
they introduced ha& been productive of much evil and very little 
good. While, on the one hand, the native industry and trade 
have been stimulated by increased demand and by the freedom 
enjoyed in the English ports, they have, on the other hand, been 
subjected by the Portuguese, English and Dutch, to a series of des¬ 
potic restraints, extending over a period of three hundred years: 
and, within the range of the last nation’s influence, continued, 
however modified, to this hour: which far more than counterba¬ 
lance all the advantages that can be placed in the opposite scale. 
The effect of the successive immigrations, revolutions and admix¬ 
tures which we have indicated or alluded to, has been, that there are 
now in the Archipelago an extraordinary number of races, differing in 
colour, habits, civilization, and language, and living under forms of 
government and laws, or customs, exhibiting the greatest variety. The 
same cause which isolated the aborigenes into numerous distinct 
tribes and kept them separate,—the exuberant vegetation of th« 
islands,—has resisted the influence, so far as it was originally 
amalgamating, of every successive foreign civilization that has do¬ 
minated; and the aboriginal nomades of the jungle and the sea, 
in their unchanged habits and mode of life, reveal to then Eu¬ 
ropean contemporary, the condition of their race at a time when 
bis own fore-fathers were as rude and far more savage. The 
more civilized races, after attaining a certain measure of advance¬ 
ment, have been separated by their acquired habits from the un¬ 
altered races, and have too often turned their superiority into the 
means of oppressing, and thereby more completely imprisoning in 
the barbarism of the jungles, such of them as lived in their pro¬ 
ximity. So great is the diversity of tribes, that if a dry catalogue 
of names suited the purpose of this sketch, we could not afford 
space to enumerate them. But, viewing human life in the Ai- 
chipelago as a general contemplation, we may recall a few of the 
broader peculiarities which would be most likely to dwell on toe 
memory after leaving the region. 
In the hearts of the forests we meet man scantily covered with 
the bark of a tree, and living on wild fruits, which he seeks with 
the agility of the monkey, and wild animals, which he tracks 
with the keen eye and scent of a beast of prey, and slays with 
a poisoned arrow projected from a hollow bambu by his bieath. 
