7/6 0N THE ALPHABETS OF THE INDIAN AUCHlPEEAGO, 
The developement of a civilization in which the invention of let¬ 
ters would spring up, would require that the natural circumstances 
of a country should be favourable. The territory must be suf¬ 
ficiently large, and sufficiently fertile and easy of cultivation, to pro¬ 
duce a population numerous enough for its own defence, and there¬ 
fore, to afford sufficient leisure to any class of its inhabitants. No 
respectable amount of civilization has ever risen, and no letters have 
ever been invented, in any country of the Archipelago destitute of 
these advantages. 
The nine alphabets of the Archipelago are the prodece of five 
large islands only, out of the innumerable ones which compose it. 
The most fertile and eivilized island, Java, has produced the most 
perfect alphabet, and that which has acquired the widest diffusion. 
The entire great group of the Philippines has produced, and that in 
its greatest and most fertile island only, a single alphabet; even this 
one is less perfect than the alphabets of the western nations, in pro¬ 
portion as the Phillippine islanders, when first seen by Europeans, 
were in a lower state of civilization than the nations of the w'est of 
the Archipelago. 
The Malayan Peninsula and Borneo, extensive as they are, have 
never given rise to an indigenous civilization, sufficient to raise their 
inhabitants beyond the condition of small and miserable communi¬ 
ties, and hence no indigenous alphabet can be traced to them. 
Their more civilized inhabitants are invariably stranger emigrants. 
This must he owing to the absence of a certain kind of fertility in 
the land available to the rude and feeble efforts of a native industiy, 
such as elsewhere gave rise to a concentrated population, to leisure 
and to letters. 
No kind of native writing can he traced to the Spice Islands 
which, notwithstanding their rich native productions, are incapable 
of yielding corn, iron, or cattle, the rough staples of early civiliza¬ 
tion, and without the presence of which, letters have never been in¬ 
vented or existed. In the great island of New Guinea, with its sav¬ 
age negro population, avid with the same deficiencies, the presence 
of any kind of writing is not reasonably to be looked for. 
No trace of a written character has been found in the wide ex¬ 
tent of the Islands of the Pacific. Most of them are, probably, too 
small to have furnished a population, at once sufficiently numerous 
and concentrated, to generate the amount of civilization requisite 
for the purpose. In the great islands of New Zealand, with their 
