16 
THE PRESENT CONDITION OS' 
never see an impudent air, an insolent look, or any exhibition of 
immodesty, or hear coarse, abusive or indecent language. In their 
mutual intercourse they are respectful, and, while good humour¬ 
ed and open, habitually reflective and considerate. They are much 
given to amusements of various kinds, fond of music, poetry and 
romances, and in their common conversation addicted to senten¬ 
tious remarks, proverbs, and metrical sentiments or allusions. To 
the first impression of the European, the inhabitants, (ike the ve¬ 
getation and animals of the Archipelago, are altogether strange, 
because the characteristics in which they differ from those to 
which we are habituated, affect the senses more vividly than those 
in which they agree. For a time the colour, features, dress, man¬ 
ners and habits which we see and the languages which we hear, 
are those of a new world. But with the fresh charms, the exag- . 
gerated impressions also, of novelty, wear away; and then, retracing 
our steps, we wonder that people so widely separated from the 
nations of the west, both geographically and historically, and real¬ 
ly differing so much in their outward aspect, should, in their more 
latent traits, so much resemble them. The nearer we come to 
the inner spirit of humanity, the more points of agreement ap¬ 
pear, and this not merely in the possession of the universal attri¬ 
butes of human nature, but in * specific habits, usages, and super- 
stations. 
What at first seems stranger still is, that when we seek the native 
of the Archipelago in the mountains of the interior, where he has 
lived for probably more than two thousand years secluded from all 
foreign influence, and where we expect to find all the differences at 
their maximum, we are sometimes astonished to find him appro¬ 
ximating most closely of all to the European. In the Jakun, for 
instance, girded though his loins are with terap bark, and armed 
as he is with his sumpitan and poisoned arrows, we recog¬ 
nize the plain and clownish manners, and simple ideas of the 
uneducated poasant in the more secluded parts of European coun¬ 
tries; and when he describes how, at his merry makings, his neigh¬ 
bours assemble, the arrack tampji flows around, and the dance, 
in which both sexes mingle, is prolonged, till each seats himself 
on the ground with his partner on his knee and his bambu of 
arrack by the side, when the dance gives place to song, we are 
