Negritos of Luzon.
NEGRILLOS
'920
NEGRO
arc despised and hated; and the buffalo-hunters in the woods, when they meet with them, do not scruple to shoot them down like wild beasts or game. "It has not come to my knowledge," says Mallat, '• that a fam- ily of these Negroes ever took up their abode in a vil- lage. If the Mohammedan inhabitants make slaves of them, they will rather submit to be beaten to death than undergo any bodily fatigue ; and it is impossible,
either by force or persuasion, to bring them to labor
Prompted by an irresistible instinct to return to the idace of their birth, they prefer a savage life to all the charms of civilization. It has occurred that individuals, wlio have taken Negritos during their infancy, and made sacrilices to give them an education, have found themselves suddenly abandoned by tliem" (ii, 95). The same writer, an ecclesiastic, speaks of them as gentle and inoffensive in their manners, whenever he himself came in contact with them; and althougli informed that some of them were cannibals, he was not inclined to believe the report. Dr. Carl Scherzer, the historian of the circumnavigation of the .Vorr;?Y/, when at Manil- la, had an opportunity of seeing a Negrita girl whom he thus describes : " This was a girl of about twelve or fourteen years of age, of dwarf-like figure, with woolly hair, broad nostrils, but without the dark skin and wide everted lips wliich characterize the Negro type. This l)leasing-li)oking, symmetrically-formed girl had been brought up in the house of a Spaniard, apparentlj' with the pious ol)ject of rescuing her soul from heathenism. Tlie poor little Ncgrilla hardly understood her own mother-tongue, besides a very little Tagal, so that we had considerable difficulty in understanding each other." According to Spanish statements, the Negritos are found only in five of the Philippine Islands, viz. Luzon, Min- doro, I'anay, Negros, and Mindanao, and are estimated at about 25,000 souls. A few exist, however, in the interior of some of the other islands in the Eastern archipelago; and they are scattered also, though in small numbers, through certain islands of Polynesia. Tlie}^ are altogether an island people, and are hence treated of by .Prichard under the designation of Pela- gian Negroes. By Dr. Pickering they arc regarded as a distinct race, resembling the Papuan, but differing from it in the diminutive stature, the general absence of a beard, the projecting of tlie lower part of the face or tiie inclined profile, and the exaggerated Negro features. The hair, also, is more woolly than that of the Papuans, though far from equalling that of the Negroes in knotty closeness. I5y Latham the Negritos are classified under the subdivision of "Oceanic^ Mongolidic, C," which sub- division is further modified b)' him into the designation of "Amphinesians" and " Kelaenonesians." JluUer, in his Allfjcmeine Ethnorjraphie (Vienna, 1873), classifies them among the Papuans of the pure type, but Wallace considers them a totally distinct race, and, connecting them with the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, is of opinion that they are probably of Asiatic rather than of Polynesian origin ; and Pe- schel, in his Volkerkunde (2d ed. Leipsic, 187.5), prefers to call them Asiatic Papuans, in distinction from Aus- tralian Papuans. Tlie Negritos out of the Philippine Islands are found for the most part in the islands em- braced under the latter designation, as New Guinea, New Ireland, Solomon's Isles, Louisiade, New Caledonia, and Tasmania or Van Diemen's Land. Except in the last -mentioned island, however, tlie Negritos, strictly speaking — that is, the blackish people witii woolly hair — do not preponderate over the other native tribes less strongly marked with Negro features; while in Tas- mania itself the race lias almost entirely <lisappeared, amounting at present to not more tlian two or three j dozen souls. Dr. Pickering is of opinion tiiat "tlie Nc- j grito race once occupied more space than it does at this time, and tliat it has in many instances iireeeded the ] dissemination of otlier races." We conclude with a de- scription of a Negrito native of Erromango (the islaml j where the missionary Williams was murdered), supplied I
to Dr. Pickering by Horatio Hales, his associate in the United States ex[)loring expedition. "He was about five feet high," says Mr. Hales, "slender and long limbed; he had close woolly hair, and retreating arched forehead, short and scanty eyebrows, and small snub nose, thick lips (especially the upper), a retreating chin, and that projection of the jaws and lower part of the face which is one of the distinctive characteristics of the Negro race. . . . Placed in a crowd of African blacks, there was nothing about him by which he could have been distin- guished from the rest."