R. G. Latham

“ No country in the world of equal magnitude with China has so homogeneous or so dense a population. From the ocean to Tibet, from Korea to Cochin-China, the language is one, and the physiognomy is one; and it is only when we reach the mountain-ridges of the west and south, that we find, in the ruder and more imperfectly civilized tribes that inhabit them, any material variation from the general uniformity of the most populous empire in the world. ”

“ Whoever is chosen commands the obedience of the rest—the election is half counsel, half feast. Chicha is drunk; wounds are exhibited; exploits are recounted: the most worthy is selected from his peers.
After this fires are lighted as beacons, and the warriors of tribes meet from all parts. When they can make the attack, they do it by night, and at the full-moon. How they treat their captives is a matter upon which there is a conflict in the evidence. ”

“ The publication of the observations of the Rajah of Sarawak, and of his visitors, has dispelled much darkness. Still the light is imperfect; or, rather, it is partial. What we now know we know in detail, and on authoritative evidence; our knowledge being, chiefly, for the north-western coast, from Pontianak, on the Equator, to the parts round the Kenebalow mountain on the northern extremity of the island.
I shall just give so much of Sir J. Brooke's observations as bear upon those points wherein the ethnology of Borneo either explains or differs from that of Sumatra. ”

“ When a man is about to marry among a particular race of mountaineers, he allows two of his teeth to be knocked out with a hammer and hard chisel, to avert the mischiefs of matrimony. These, too, cut off the forelocks and spread the hair behind; they also, like the Chinese, bestow some attention upon the beauty of their eyebrows. ”

“ One cause of hostility among them, both public and private, is the absurd idea which they entertain, that no person dies a natural death. If a man perishes of disease, at a distance from his friends, his death is supposed to have been caused by some sorcerer of another tribe, whose life must be taken for satisfaction. ”

“ Hodgson, none but themselves can live in their own localities; since "the Saul forest everywhere, but especially to the east of the Kósi, is malarious to an extent which no human beings can endure, save the remarkable races, which for ages have made it their dwelling-place. To all others, European or native, it is deadly from April to November. Yet the Dhimál, the Bodo, the Kíchak, the Tharú, the Dénwár, not only live but thrive in it, exhibiting no symptoms whatever of that dreadful stricken aspect of countenance and form which marks the victim of malaria." ”

“ Respecting, then, the absolute date of the Polynesian migration, there is no reason why it should not be known in particular islands; for instance, in the Dangerous Archipelago, where only a small proportion of the clusters is peopled even at present, any given island may receive a population so late as this, the eleventh hour of the extension of the human species; yet it is evident that the knowledge of such a migration would throw but little light upon the broader question of the date of the Polynesian population en masse. ”

“ In respect to the abundance and value of its ethnological materials, South America, especially for its interior, is one of the dark spots of the world—it is better known than Central Africa, and better known than New Guinea: and saying this we have said all.
And here it may be well to indicate an ethnological method. In Tierra del Fuego we have one of the six extreme points of population; i.e. points from which no population has been supposed to have been determined elsewhere; Easter Island, Van Dieman's Land, the Cape of Good Hope, Lapland, and Ireland, being the other five. ”

“ Our knowledge, however, has by no means been proportionate to the number and variety of facts capable of being elicited. Indeed, with the exception of New Guinea, Central Africa, and parts of South America, Borneo has been, to the ethnologist, the darkest area in the world. That there were Mahometan Malays in the towns, that there were pirates on the coast, and that there were Dyaks in the interior has, until lately, been the sum of our information. ”

“ The Bodo and Dhimáls both alike bury the dead, immediately after decease, with simple but decent reverence, though no fixed burial ground nor artificial tomb is in use to mark the last resting place of those most dear in life, because the migratory habits of the people would render such usages nugatory. The family and friends form a funeral procession, which bears the dead in silence to the grave. ”

“ Múoi (Mawi) is more man than God; the supporter, or rather the support, of the earth. This lies on the gigantic extension of his body; and earthquakes result from its movements. Where he is either more or less than the comparatively passive substructure of all things material, he is a wise wizard who foretells events; or else the maker rather than foundation-stone of the world. Just as Tangaloa did in the other parts of Polynesia, Mawi did in New Zealand. ”

“ However, between the direction in latitude, and the direction in longitude, as this distribution of the Eskimo area may be called, there is a difference which is a very important one. The Eskimos of the Atlantic are not only easily distinguished from the tribes of American aborigines which lie to the south or west of them, and with which they come in contact, but they stand in strong contrast and opposition to them—a contrast and opposition exhibited equally in appearance, manners, language, and one which has had full justice done to it by those who have written on the subject. ”

“ The woman who is nearest of kin to the deceased, steps out from the crowd, digs up the skull, and draws it up with her hands. At sight of the bones, her strength seems to fail her; she shrieks, she sobs, and tears of anguish abundantly fall to the mouldering object of her pious care. ”

“ It is by their eyes that, like the Chinese, these people are distinguishable. These organs have not that rotundity, which those of other nations exhibit, but are oblong, small, and are sunk deeper in the head, in consequence of which these people have almost the appearance of being pink-eyed. Their eyes are dark-brown, or rather black, and the eyelids form in the great angle of the eye a deep furrow, which makes the Japanese look as if they were sharp-sighted, and discriminates them from other nations. ”

“ The language varies from the refined speech of the Mandarins [Pg 17] to the comparative rudeness of certain provincial dialects; the complexion and contour of the face vary also; and the civilization is less characteristic in some districts than in others; but all these deviations lie within narrow limits.
In China, the steppe-land of High Asia slopes downwards to the North Pacific. Hence we have a sea-board of average proportion as compared with the inland area. It faces, however, one ocean only; and that the Pacific. Of this no island larger than Hainan is inhabited by a Chinese population ”

“ Whether, however, so low a rank in scale of human development be, upon the whole, a fact or exaggeration, it is certain that, upon several points, there has been considerable overstatement. One sample of this sort is the accredited opinion as to the absolute incapacity of the Australian of forming even the rudest elements of a mythology—an opinion which engenders the notion that their intellects are too sluggish for even the evolution of a superstition. ”

“ When we know whether a given family habitually extends, or habitually contracts its area, we know what will be the probable distribution of the unfixed ancient tribes on the frontier.
In the critical ethnology of the classical writers many problems must be worked in this way; the inferences in the two alternatives being diametrically the reverse of each other.
1. In a people with an habitually encroaching frontier, no tribe described by earlier writers as lying beyond its present geographical area, is to be considered as having formed part of it (i.e. the family with an encroaching frontier) . ”

“ Of all the portions of the Indian Archipelago, the vast island of Borneo, the greatest in the world after Australia, and lying under the Equator, presents us with the Malay development on the largest scale.
In the exceeding paucity of the elements of Indian culture it stands in remarkable opposition to Java, and even to Celebes and the Philippines, whilst the Mahometan influences are extended but little beyond the large towns and the coast. Hence the central parts are Malay in the most unmodified form; even as the Batta districts of Sumatra are Malay. ”

“ According to the former, the Algonkin, Iroquois, Sioux, Catawba, Cherokee, Choctah, and Caddo, and Uché languages differ from one another, as the English and Turkish, or the Greek and Lapplandic, i.e. as languages reducible to no common class, a view which makes divisions so large as the Algonkin, and so small as the Uché, equally equivalent to the great class denominated Indo-European—a doctrine by no means improbable in itself, since it differs in degree rather than in kind, from the similar juxtaposition of large and small, simple and sub-divided classes, which we find in Europe ”

“ In the way of inference we must guard against over-valuing the import of them. They are not upon light grounds to be considered as the measures of a civilization so different from that of the tribes hitherto enumerated, as to suggest the machinery of either unnecessary migrations, or unascertained degradations or annihilations of race.
The difference between the great interior basin of California, and the valleys of the rivers Gila and Colorado, with their feeders, is that of a desert and the oases that lie within it. ”

“ Bodily disfigurations under the idea of ornament.—Of the well-known stories of the little pinched-up feet of Chinese women I said nothing; waiting until I came to a ruder stage of society, before I noticed any of those numerous imaginary improvements upon the human form, which are almost invariably found amongst the lower tribes of our species. The Malay dress is becoming; but the Malay habit of permanently disfiguring parts of the body under the idea of ornament, is of sufficient prominence to take place amongst the characteristics of the branch. ”