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COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL 
intellectual improvement of the native. The prestige of 
race might very well have carried in its train both Chris¬ 
tianity and education, as it did with the Spaniards in the 
Philippines, but it is now disappearing, to leave behind 
it a semi-pagan Islamism and the knowledge gained by 
attendance at Mohammedan schools. The “ culture- 
system ” of the Dutch in Java has often been severely 
attacked, but there is much to be said in favour of it, 
and a far more serious charge to which Holland has to 
answer is her neglect of the education and religion of her 
Javanese subjects in past years. 
8. Antiquities. 
The original source of the Hindu religion in Java 
is not known. All that is known v/ith any certainty is 
the date of its overthrow. In 1478, as has been already 
stated, the principality of Majapahit was conquered 
by the Mohammedans, and its great city destroyed. 
But between the time of the Hindu immigration and 
this date, whether we place the former in the sixth 
century or earlier, a period of many centuries must 
have elapsed, and from time to time, at dates which are 
for the most part conjectural, a vast number of mag¬ 
nificent palaces, temples, and cities, together with 
sculptures and other works of art, were erected, whose 
ruins now astonish the traveller as he comes upon them 
in the midst of the forest or on the mountain side. 
Volumes have been written upon these ruins from 
the time they were first brought to "the notice of the 
antiquarian world at the beginning of this century to 
the publication of Dr. Leemans’ great work on Boro-bodor, 
in 1884, and it would be impossible to notice here a 
tenth part of those already known and described. The 
