frequently resorted to; prefixes and suffixes, especially the former, are also applied to the same purpose. Only the personal pronouns have a peculiar kind of variation by number, produced by composition and fusion with the numerals: in this way are often distinguished not only a singular, dual, and plural, but also a tri-al, denoting three: and the numbers other than singular of the first person have a double form, according as the we is meant to include or to exclude the person addressed.
The races to whom belong the dialects we have thus characterized are of a brown colour. But these do not make up the whole population of the Pacific island-world. The groups of little islands lying to the east of New Guinea—the New Hebrides, the Solomon's islands, New Caledonia, and others—are inhabited by a black race, having frizzled or woolly hair, yet showing no other signs of relationship with the natives of Africa. Men of like physical characteristics are found to occupy the greater part of New Guinea, and more or less of the other islands lying westward, as far as the Andaman group, in the Bay of Bengal. They are known by various names, as Negritos, Papuans, Melanesians. Some of their languages have been recently brought by missionary effort to the knowledge of linguistic scholars, and help to prove the race distinct from the Polynesian. In point of material, a wide diversity exists among the dialects of the different tribes; they exhibit almost the extreme of linguistic discordance; each little island has its own idiom, unintelligible to all its neighbours, and sometimes the separate districts of the same islet are unable to communicate together. Yet, so far as they have been examined, distinct traces of a common origin have been found; and in general plan of structure they agree not only among themselves, but also, in a marked degree, with the Polynesian tongues, so that they are perhaps to be regarded as ultimately coinciding with the latter in origin.[1]
The aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and of parts of the neighbouring islands are by some set down as a distinct
- ↑ See Von der Gabelentz, Die Melanesischen Sprachen, etc., in vol. viii. (1861) of the Memoirs of the Saxon Society of Sciences.
