e
and language to the Torres Straits Islanders, and exhibiting
approximately the same level of social and intellectual culture. New
Guinea, roughly speaking, appears to be occupied by two different races,
to which the names of Papuan and Melanesian are now given; and it is to
the Papuan race, not to the Melanesian, that the Torres Straits
Islanders are akin. The Papuans, a tall, dark-skinned, frizzly-haired
race, inhabit apparently the greater part of New Guinea, including the
whole of the western and central portions of the island. The
Melanesians, a smaller, lighter-coloured, frizzly-haired race, inhabit
the long eastern peninsula, including the southern coast from about Cape
Possession eastward,[310] and tribes speaking a Melanesian language are
also settled about Finsch Harbour and Huon Gulf in German New
Guinea.[311] These Melanesians are most probably immigrants who have
settled in New Guinea from the north and east, where the great chain of
islands known as Melanesia stretches in an immense semicircle from New
Ireland on the north to New Caledonia on the south-east. The natives of
this chain of islands or series of archipelagoes are the true
Melanesians; their kinsmen in New Guinea have undergone admixture with
the Papuan aborigines, and accordingly should rather be called
Papuo-Melanesians than Melanesians simply. Their country appears to be
wholly comprised within the limits of British and German New Guinea; so
far as I am aware, the vast area of Dutch New Guinea is inhabited solely
by tribes of the Papuan race. In respect of material culture both races
stand approximately on the same level: they live in settled villages,
they practise agriculture, they engage in commerce, and they have a
fairly developed barbaric art. Thus they have made some progress in the
direction of civilisation; certainly they have far outstripped the
wandering savages of Australia, who subsist entirely on the products of
the chase and on the natural fruits of the earth.

[Sidenote: Scantiness of our information as to the natives of New
Guinea.]

But although the natives of New Guinea have now been under the rule of
European powers, Britain, Germany, and Holland, for many years, we
unfortunately possess little detailed information as to their mental and
social condition. It is true that the members of the Cambridge
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits visited some parts of the
southern coasts of British New Guinea, and several