of the eastern island world, especially with their great distances apart, a variety of mankind that had never manifested any aptitude for maritime enterprises should have spread themselves over this vast ocean area, in order to settle down on this island and on that, is so unreasonable that it has found scarcely a defender worth naming. More and more the blacks are coming to be considered the original peoples, the ‘Indios’ to be the intruders. For this there is a quite reasonable ground, in that on many islands the blacks dwell in the interior, difficult of access, especially in the dense and unwholesome mountain forests, while the lighter complexioned tribes have settled the coasts. To this are added linguistic proofs, which place the lighter races, of homogeneous speech, in linguistic relations with the higher races, especially the Malays. Dogmatically it has been said that originally these islands had been occupied entirely by the primitive black population, but afterwards, through intrusions from the sea, these blacks were gradually pressed away from the coast and shoved back into the interior.
The problem, though it appears simple enough, has become complicated more and more through the progress of discovery, especially since Cook enlarged our knowledge of the oriental island world. A new and still more pregnant contrast then thrust itself to the front in the fact that the blacks and the lighter-colored peoples are each separated into widely differing groups. While the former hold especially the immense, almost continental, regions of Australia (New Holland) and New Guinea, and also the larger archipelagos, such as New Hebrides, Solomon Islands, Fiji (Viti) Archipelago—that is, the western areas—the north and east, Micronesia and Polynesia, were occupied by lighter-colored peoples. So the first divison into Melanesia and Polynesia has in latest times come to be of value and the dogma once fixed has remained. For the Polynesians are by many allied to the Malays, while the blacks are put together as a special ethnological race.
For practical ethnology this division may suffice. But the scientific man will seek also for the blacks a genetic explanation. The answer has been furnished by one of the greatest ethnologists, Theodor Waitz,[1] who, after he had exposed the insufficiency of the accepted formulas, came to the conclusion that the differentiation of the blacks from the lighter peoples might be an error. He denied that there had been a primitive black race in Micronesia and Polynesia; in his opinion we have here to do with a single race. The color of the Polynesians may be out and out from natural causes different; indeed, ‘their entire physical appearance indicates the greatest variability.’ Herein the
- ↑ Anthropologie der Naturvölker, Vol. V; The South Sea Islanders, Part II; The Micronesians and Northwestern Polynesians. Leipzig, 1870, pp. 33-36. Finsch, Verh. d. Berliner Anthrop. Ges., 1882, p. 164.
