officials and
travellers, we have a good general knowledge of many of the peoples
of the eastern coast of the south-eastern peninsula of New Guinea,
and of some of the islands from the Trobriands to the Louisiades. The
Ethnology of the fertile and populous Mekeo district has been mainly
made known to us by the investigations of various members of the
Sacred Heart Mission, and by Dr. Seligmann. What little we know of
the Papuan Gulf district is due to missionaries among the coastal
tribes, Mr. James Chalmers and Mr. W. Holmes. Dr. G. Landtman is at
present investigating the natives of the delta of the Fly river and
Daudai. The natives of the Torres Straits islands have also been
studied as fully as is possible. But of the mountain region lying
behind the Mekeo district very little indeed has been published; so
Mr. Williamson's book fills a gap in our knowledge of Papuan ethnology.

We have as yet a very imperfect knowledge of the ethnological history
of New Guinea. Speaking very broadly, it is generally admitted that
the bulk of the population belongs to the Papuan race, a dark-skinned,
woolly-haired people who have also spread over western Oceania; but,
to a greater or less extent, New Guinea has been subject to cultural
and racial influences from all sides, except from Australia, where the
movement has been the other way. Thus the East Indian archipelago has
directly affected parts of Netherlands New Guinea, and its influence
is to be traced to a variable degree in localities in the Bismarck
archipelago, German New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelm's Land), Western
Oceania, and British New Guinea or Papua, as it is termed officially.

The south-eastern peninsula of New Guinea--or at all events the
coastal regions--has been largely affected by immigrants, who were
themselves a mixed people, and who came later at various times. It is
to these immigrants that Mr. Ray and I applied the term Melanesian
(Ray, S. H., and Haddon, A. C., "A Study of the Languages of Torres
Straits," _Proc. Roy. Irish Acad._, 3rd ser., IV., 1897, p. 509). Early
in 1894, Mr. Ray read a paper before the Anthropological Institute
(_Journ. Anth. Inst._, XXIV., p. 15), in which he adhered to our former
discrimination of two linguistic stocks and added a third type of
language composed of a mixture of the other two, for which he proposed
the name Melano-Papuan. These languages, according to Mr. Ray, occur
in the Trobriands, Woodlarks and the Louisiades, and si