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They are classed as Negroids, or Negritos, and they bear a considerable resemblance to the African pygmies, with whom at least one authority classes them. They are materially larger and taller than the pygmies, however, though below the average stature of Europeans. At all events they are among the lowest type of human beings.
Kowfat, lying as the reader knows, on the Kowfat River, occupies the hinterland between the back end of south-west Somaliland and the east, that is to say, the west, bank of Lake P'schu. It thus forms an enclave between the Dog Men of Darfur and the Negritos of T'chk. The inhabitants of Kowfat are a coloured race three quarters negroid and more than three quarters tabloid.
I had one of these arrows presented to me by the chief of these Negritos, but, as a rule, they are very hard to get as the Negritos value them very highly. An American officer I met in Manila told me that he had been quartered for some time in a district where there were many Negritos, and though he had offered large rewards for one of these arrows he was not successful in getting one.
The Dayaks are almost as dirty as the Negritos in the Philippines, and yet they are both certainly the merriest people I have ever met with. The heartiest and most unaffected laughter I have ever heard proceeded from the throats of Dayaks and Negritos. It almost seems as if dirt in some cases constitutes true happiness.
The wide distribution of remnants of the Negrito race in the islands round about Borneo and in the adjacent parts of the mainland of Asia renders it highly probable that at a remote period Negritos lived in Borneo; but at the present time there exist no Negrito community and no distinct traces of the race, whether in the form of fossil remains or of physical characters of the present population, unless the curly hair and coarse features of a few individuals to be met with in almost all the tribes may be regarded as such traces.
In this connection the study of the Philippines is rich with instruction. In the limits of the almost insular, isolated Negrito enclave, mixtures between Negritos and Indios very seldom surprise one, and never the transitions that can have arisen in the post-generative time of development.
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.
The Tasmanian Fauna and Flora are essentially Australian, and the like is true to a less extent of many, if not of all, the Papuan islands; but the Negritos who inhabit these islands are strikingly different from the Australians. Again, the differences between the Mongolians and the Xanthochroi are out of all proportion greater than those between the Faunae and Florae of Central and Eastern Asia.
I will, however, so as not to be misunderstood, expressly emphasize that I am not willing to declare that the two peoples have been at all times so constituted; I am now speaking of actual conditions. In the same sense I wish also my remarks concerning the Negritos to be taken. Not one fact is in evidence from which we may conclude that a single neighboring people known to us has been Negritized.
No authoritative evidence of their occurrence in Borneo is forthcoming, and one can confidently assert that there are no Negritos in Sarawak. Nor are there any traces of Melanesians.
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