phs of the Zambales Negritos were made by Mr. J. Diamond
and those of the Bataan Negritos are from the collection of Hon. Dean
C. Worcester, Secretary of the Interior. Credit for each photograph
is given on the plate as it appears.

CHAPTER I

DISTRIBUTION OF NEGRITOS

Probably no group of primitive men has attracted more attention from
the civilized world than the pygmy blacks. From the time of Homer and
Aristotle the pygmies, although their existence was not absolutely
known at that early period, have had their place in fable and legend,
and as civilized man has become more and more acquainted with the
unknown parts of the globe he has met again and again with the same
strange type of the human species until he has been led to conclude
that there is practically no part of the tropic-zone where these
little blacks have not lived at some time.

Mankind at large is interested in a race of dwarfs just as it would
be in a race of giants, no matter what the color or social state; and
scientists have long been concerned with trying to fix the position of
the pygmies in the history of the human race. That they have played an
important ethnologic role can not be doubted; and although to-day they
are so scattered and so modified by surrounding people as largely to
have disappeared as a pure type, yet they have everywhere left their
imprint on the peoples who have absorbed them.

The Negritos of the Philippines constitute one branch of the Eastern
division of the pygmy race as opposed to the African division, it being
generally recognized that the blacks of short stature may be so grouped
in two large and comprehensive divisions. Other well-known branches of
the Eastern group are the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands and perhaps
also the Papuans of New Guinea, very similar in many particulars to the
Negritos of the Philippines, although authorities differ in grouping
the Papuans with the Negritos. The Asiatic continent is also not
without its representatives of the black dwarfs, having the Sakai of
the Malay Peninsula. The presence of Negritos over so large an area has
especially attracted the attention of anthropologists who have taken
generally one or the other of two theories advanced to explain it:
First, that the entire oceanic region is a partly submerged continent,
once connected with the Asiatic mainland and over which this aboriginal
race spread prior to the subsidence. The second theory is that the
peoplin