174 SISSANO. 
which engages with the climatic constants of Melanesia to support 
the theory of eastward migration. The other fact lies in Indonesia 
itself. If the theory of drift material were otherwise tenable we should 
expect to find the greater mass of such at the eastern border of the 
Malay Archipelago, say from the Philippines down to Aru and Timor 
Laut, steadily recessive in a westerly direction, and reaching its mini- 
mum in the Kawi of Java and the Malay of Sumatra; which we find 
to be not in the least the case. Polynesian loan material is to the full 
as abundant in the west as in the east. 
Recorded and datable history of India and of Java presents to us 
considerable detail of the onward sweep of peoples now Indonesian a 
little earlier than the Christian era. We are unable to find a sure 
recognition of a home of Polynesians earlier than the Malay Archi- 
pelago, but of the Indonesians we have a clear record of their passage 
through India and of their entrance upon the islands of their present 
abode by way of the Malakka Peninsula and Sumatra. We know 
this horde to have been superior to the Proto-Polynesians in a vital 
point of culture; they were already smiths. The history of mankind 
shows conclusively that the race with the knife possesses the earth; 
the man with the club and the dornick shaped to his hand is beaten; 
he dies or he scuttles away. These Malayans had the kris; under 
its alien designation of bolo it has been the weapon of serious resistance 
in the Philippines to a culture whose weapon is as much superior to 
the kris as the knife is superior to the stone hatchet. Before the 
approach of the knife-armed Malayans the Proto-Polynesian resistance 
could not endure; the club fighters died or fled. At each point of 
former Proto-Polynesian occupancy of Indonesia we assume the defeat 
of the armed resistance, and the whole story of primitive man the 
world around warrants this assumption. We then have at that point 
a debellated community culturally inferior; the active men killed in 
the decisive battle of their tiny world, the non-combatants, women, 
children, and the aged awaiting the event. If sufficient of the active 
warriors remain alive, if their force still suffices to admit of certain 
freedom of action of their part, we may conceive of a voyage of escape, 
the conquerors quite satisfied with such an easy outcome, the cruising 
for new homes to which the enemy has not yet penetrated. Such 
must have been the origin of the great migrations eastward whose 
course we have been tracking. If the defeat of the original inhabi- 
tants has been sufficient to prevent the possibility of such escape we 
find the vanquished reduced to slavery by the victor, a condition of 
life which does not begin to become intolerable until a much higher 
advance in general culture. Experience shows abundantly how 
readily a victor people tends to assume some element of the domestic 
speech of its slaves. This is prominent in our picture of Indonesia 
during its transition period two millenniums ago. 
