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While they were issuing their first edicts the Grass finished off the East Indies, covered threequarters of Australia and attacked the southern Philippines. Millions of Indonesians traveling the comparatively short distances in anything floatable crowded the already overpopulated areas of Asia.
The systematic ethnographers use this term in a vague and uncertain manner. He recognises that the Indonesians and the Malayans are of very similar physical characters, but distinguishes them as two of four races which have given rise to the population of the Malay Archipelago namely, Malayans, Indonesians, Negritos, and Papuans.
Polynesians and Indonesians are the product of an ancient blend of southern Mongols with a fair Caucasic stock. In both the Caucasic element predominates, but more so in the Polynesian than in the Indonesian. We imagine this blending to have been effected at a remote period in the south-eastern corner of Asia, probably before the date at which Borneo became separated from the mainland.
These are the Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians, whom Latham has grouped together under the common title of AMPHINESIANS. The cranial characters of these people, as of the Negritos, are less constant than those of their skin and hair. The Maori has a long skull; the Sandwich Islander a broad skull.
The problem of the Indonesians is far from solved, nor is it known who the original inhabitants of Borneo were, Negritos or others, and what role, if any, the ancestors of the Polynesians played remains to be discovered. The generally accepted idea has been that the Malays inhabit the coasts and the Dayaks the interior.
Believing the rice to be animated by a soul like that of a man, the Indonesians naturally treat it with the deference and the consideration which they show to their fellows.
The scientific descriptions of a typical Malay is as follows: "Stature little over five feet, complexion olive yellow, head brachy-cephalous or round, cheek-bones prominent, eyes black and slightly oblique, nose small but not flat, nostrils dilated, hands small and delicate, legs thin and weak, hair black, coarse and lank, beard absent or scant;" but these Indonesians to whom belong most of the indigenous inhabitants of Celebes, are taller and have fairer or light brown complexions and regular features, connecting them with the brown Polynesians of the Eastern Pacific "who may be regarded as their descendants," and Professor KEANE accounts for their presence by assuming "a remote migration of the Caucasic race to South-Eastern Asia, of which evidences are not lacking in Camboja and elsewhere, and a further onward movement, first to the Archipelago and then East to the Pacific."
Keane describes the Indonesians as a Proto-Caucasic race which must have occupied Malaysia and the Philippines in the New Stone Age.
We believe that the Kayans migrated to Borneo from the basin of the Irrawadi by way of Tenasserim, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra; and that they represent a part of the Indonesian stock which had remained in the basin of the Irrawadi and adjacent rivers from the time of the separation of Borneo, there, through contact with the southward drift of peoples from China, receiving fresh infusions of Mongol blood; a part, therefore, of the Indonesians which is more Mongoloid in character than that part which at a remote period was shut up in Borneo by its separation from the mainland.
Our suggestion is, then, that these two systems may have had a common root; that, while the Aryans carried the system westward into Europe, the Indonesians, or some Caucasic people which has been merged in the Indonesian stock, carried it eastward; and that the Kayans, with their strongly conservative tendencies, their serious religious temperament, and strong tribal organisation, have, of all the Indonesians, preserved most faithfully this ancient religious system and have imparted it in a more or less partial manner to the tribes to whom they have given so much else of culture, custom, and belief.
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