this idiom gradually supplants their own, but the old vocabularies are often largely preserved by them and adopted by the obtrusive race. Thus it has been in the progress of the great formations of Asianesia (or Indonesia). The Papuans of the Viti (or Fiji) Archipelago have adopted the idiom of the intrusive Polynesians, but they have retained their native vocabularies to a great extent. So it must have been when the Iranian formation was diffused abroad. The numerous vocabularies of the Indo-European nations cannot have been derived from one mother tongue."
Page 51.—"The Western Burmans more often resemble the handsomer Asianesian (Indonesian) tribes found in Borneo, some parts of East Indonesia, and Polynesia. Similar tribes appear to have preceded the Malayan race in Sumatra,[1] for they have left their impress, to a certain extent, on the Nias and some of the Batto tribes. Even in the Peninsula, neater, lighter and handsomer men than the ordinary Malay are not infrequent amongst some of the Binua tribes.
Journal Indian Archipelago, 1852–3, p. 34.—"Whatever may be the genealogy of the Indo-Germanic formation (Aryans, etc.) it must undoubtedly have been very ancient at the period it began to spread eastward and westward. Sanskrit itself is not the parent, but the sister of the other ancient members of the family (of languages) and the great distance between Sanskrit and all other non-Iranian languages of Western Asia, makes it evident that the formation must have existed as a distinct one from the Semitic, Scythic, and Tibetan, long before the Aryan
- ↑ As I write I have before me a picture of a woman of Mantawai, an island off the coast of Sumatra. If the name of her abode had not been given, she would certainly be set down as a Polynesian, even to the dress and mode of carrying a basket.
