THE INDIAN AnCHIPELAGO. 
1/9 
Hiese were enumerated, together with the principal physical ele¬ 
ments of the knowledge and comparison of races. A glance at 
that scheme may satisfy every resident in this part of the world 
that he lias the means of making valuable contributions to know¬ 
ledge, and that it is only by the union of the information which 
different individuals have favourable opportunities of acquiring, that 
any approach to an accurate and complete body of facts, even re¬ 
lating to a single race, can be made. 
To those who, convinced that the highest duty of life is the 
intellectual and religious cultivation of themselves and their fellow men, 
do not feel themselves excited to a keen interest in the Archipelago 
by its economical or scientific possessions, who may be indiffer¬ 
ent to many of those relations which give it an importance to Eu¬ 
rope, and who may be disposed to view its inhabitants as too re¬ 
mote from their sympathies and from the sphere of their duties, to 
merit attention, they have other aspects which rise in value the more 
they are considered, and which all may admit to be the most im¬ 
portant. 
A part from all ethnological aims, the consideration of any na¬ 
tion or community remotely related to our own must afford deep in¬ 
terest and instruction. If the highest natural study of mankind is 
man, as it certainly is, because he is the highest and most complex 
manifestation which the Deity has given of His being to our percep¬ 
tions, the human race which we find inhabiting any region must be 
a nobler and more instructive study than its natural phenomena, 
however abounding in outward beauty or scientific interest. We 
see man’s nature, which we had painfully endeavoured to understand 
and to extricate from the folds of self love, habit and prejudice, at once 
stripped bare, and rearrayed in a vesture as proper to it as that of our 
own habits but widely different, so different indeed that at first we 
are little disposed to recognize ourselves in the new dress. When 
we surmount this repugnance, the peculiarities which had repelled us 
become a language which enables us at once to understand the na¬ 
ture of its possessors and our own. Traits which in themselves^ we 
might have viewed with indifference or contempt or dislike, when 
recognised as flowing from or reflecting that ancient inner nature of 
man out of which grew Adam’s life and grows our own, are felt to be 
worthy of our entire attention. Nor need we always be sustain- 
