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The dissimilitude of Sumatra and Java, separated by only a narrow channel, occurs to us, as well as that of Madagascar, but narrowly divided from the neighboring continent. So able a writer on physical geography as Sir J. E. Tennent believes that Ceylon is not a dismembered portion of India, but a distinct formation, perhaps part of a continent which has long since disappeared.
So the Hollanders were thenceforth to deal directly with the kings of Sumatra and the Moluccas, and the republics of Banda, and all the rich commonwealths and principalities of nutmegs; cloves, and indigo, unless, as grew every day more improbable, the Spaniards and Portuguese could exclude them from that traffic by main force.
But she brought the report that the last naval battle of the war had ended in victory for the Americans. Meanwhile the "Peacock" was returning from a cruise not altogether void of interest. On parting with the "Hornet," she had struck off to the southward, and in the Straits of Sundra, between Borneo and Sumatra, had fallen in with the East India Company's cruiser "Nautilus," of fourteen guns.
As the tree is of the same species with that cultivated in Arabia there is little doubt but with proper care this article might be produced of a quality equal, perhaps superior, to that imported from the West Indies; though probably the heavy rains on Sumatra may prevent its attaining to the perfection of the coffee of Mocha.*
However, when darkness fell, she came to herself and told the king the secret of her life. So the king returned to the palace, took the fish from the queen, and put it in water. Immediately Bidasari revived, and the king took her to wife. Another story of an external soul comes from Nias, an island to the west of Sumatra.
One of the most fertile sources of confusion is, classing at one time all the various nations of the Archipelago under the general name of Malay, and at another restricting the same term to one people, not more ancient, not the fountain-head of the others, who issued from the center of Sumatra, and spread themselves in a few parts of the Archipelago.
Yesterday he had stowed his dunnage, many hundred bundles of light flexible canes from Sumatra and Malacca; on these he had laid tons of rough saltpetre, in 200 lb. gunny-bags: and was now mashing it to music, bags and all.
Taking into consideration only those whose distribution is more accurately known, we learn that Sumatra is, in a zoological sense, more neatly related to Borneo than it is to Java. The great man-like apes, the elephant, the tapir, and the Malay bear, are all common to the two former countries, while they are absent from the latter.
It is of a darker colour, and is supposed to have less strength than the Turkey opium. About a hundred and fifty chests are consumed annually on the west coast of Sumatra, where it is purchased, on an average, at three hundred dollars the chest, and sold again in smaller quantities at five or six.
Apart from the Negrito or Negro strain in their blood, they are usually held to belong to that pre-Dravidian stock represented by various jungle tribes in southern India and by the Veddas of Ceylon, connecting links between the two areas being the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and East Sumatra, and the Toala of Celebes.
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