178 
REMARKS TO THE ETHN0L01& Hi? 
that in former limes it may not have repeatedly been excited to a 
partial activity, impressibility and inventiveness in different directions. 
Hence the absolute necessity of attending carefully to the condition 
of the surrounding nations, so far as light is attainable, at every suc¬ 
cessive stage to which our researches carry us back. In the Archi¬ 
pelago we can never free our researches from Continental elements. 
The history of the nations along the southern borders of Asia has in 
every era exercised some influence on the Archipelago; and we may 
be sufficiently impressed with the difficulty and importance of the in¬ 
ternational influences of the Archipelago itself, when we consider that 
while some writers have derived Malayan civilization from an original 
source in Menangkabau, others have referred it to Java, and others to 
Celebes, while two of the ablest, — Mr. Marsden and Mr. Crawford, 
*—have busied themselves in endeavouring to exhume a great nation 
whose civilization preceded the Javanese, the Malayan and the 
Bugis, and impressed itself, more or less, not only in the Ar¬ 
chipelago but over all Polynesia.'* 
, The preceding remarks have chiefly related to the grand psy¬ 
chological elements of comparative ethnography,—language in it¬ 
self and as an exponent of the character and condition of races, 
•—and the other modes by which their life manifests itself sensi- 
bly. To attempt to assign a respective value to these various 
modes would lead us into too extensive a field. In the scheme 
of desiderata annexed to the first number this Journal, many of 
* Since this paper was written the writer has received a letter from Mr. 
Crawfurd, dated in June last, in which he mentions that he had just complet¬ 
ed an essay “ on the races and languages of the Archipelago and Pacific Is¬ 
land,” and which, we observe, was read to the British Association at its last 
meeting at Oxford. “ The theory of Marsden ” says Mr. Crawfurd w adopted 
by Humboldt and others of one original language prevailing from Madagas¬ 
car to Easter Island among all the nations not negro, and the identity in 
race of the brown-complcxioned men within the limits in question, is whol¬ 
ly groundless, and a main object of my essay is to refute it. In a dictionary 
of the Madagascar of 8000 words, the number of Malay and Javanese, words 
is only 140;—in one of the New Zealand of 4560 words, 103;—in a French 
one of the Marquesas and Oman of 3000 words, about 70;—and in a Spa¬ 
nish Dictionary of the Tagala of the Philippines of 9000 words about 300. 
These facts are of themselves almost refutation sufficient, to say nothing 
of the different phonetic character and grammatical structure of all the lan¬ 
guages. Over the whole vast field under examination there are but two 
wide-spread languages that can be said to have dialects—the Malay and 
the Polynesian, the latter being essentially the same tongue in New Zealand, 
the Friendly, the Society, the Navigators and the Sandwich Islands, but in 
no others.” 
