The Next Day Was Fine, But After That The Weather Was Unprecedentedly Bad, Considering That It Ought To Have Been The Dry Monsoon.

For near a month we had wet weather; the sun either not appearing at all, or only for an hour or two about noon. Morning and evening, as well as nearly all night, it rained or drizzled, and boisterous winds, with dark clouds, formed the daily programme.

With the exception that it was never cold, it was just such weather as a very bad English November or February.

The people of Waigiou are not truly indigenes of the island, which possesses no "Alfuros," or aboriginal inhabitants. They appear to be a mixed race, partly from Gilolo, partly from New Guinea. Malays and Alfuros from the former island have probably settled here, and many of them have taken Papuan wives from Salwatty or Dorey, while the influx of people from those places, and of slaves, has led to the formation of a tribe exhibiting almost all the transitions from a nearly pure Malayan to an entirely Papuan type. The language spoken by them is entirely Papuan, being that which is used on all the coasts of Mysol, Salwatty, the north-west of New Guinea, and the islands in the great Geelvink Bay, - a fact which indicates the way in which the coast settlements have been formed. The fact that so many of the islands between New Guinea and the Moluccas - such as Waigiou, Guebe, Poppa, Obi, Batchian, as well as the south and east peninsulas of Gilolo - possess no aboriginal tribes, but are inhabited by people who are evidently mongrels and wanderers, is a remarkable corroborative proof of the distinctness of the Malayan and Papuan races, and the separation of the geographical areas they inhabit. If these two great races were direct modifications, the one of the other, we should expect to find in the intervening region some homogeneous indigenous race presenting intermediate characters. For example, between the whitest inhabitants of Europe and the black Klings of South India, there are in the intervening districts homogeneous races which form a gradual transition from one to the other; while in America, although there is a perfect transition from the Anglo- Saxon to the negro, and from the Spaniard to the Indian, there is no homogeneous race forming a natural transition from one to the other. In the Malay Archipelago we have an excellent example of two absolutely distinct races, which appear to have approached each other, and intermingled in an unoccupied territory at a very recent epoch in the history of man; and I feel satisfied that no unprejudiced person could study them on the spot without being convinced that this is the true solution of the problem, rather than the almost universally accepted view that they are but modifications of one and the same race.

The people of Muka live in that abject state of poverty that is almost always found where the sago-tree is abundant. Very few of them take the trouble to plant any vegetables or fruit, but live almost entirely on sago and fish, selling a little tripang or tortoiseshell to buy the scanty clothing they require.

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