aroundworldortra00peebiala-1

COCHIN CHINA TO SINGAPORE. 183
gutta-percha forests, pine-apple plantations, tapioca uplands,
clove and cinnamon gardens, it has its drawbacks in the
way of insects, lizards, serpents, and tigers. Mosquitoes
sing the same bloodthirsty tunes as in America. Though
tarrying at
the best hotel, our rooms are infested with flies,
beetles, fleas, and slimy lizards, crawhng upon the walls and
ceiling. The other morning, upon rising, and lifting my
pillow, out darted from under it a wretchedly ugly lizard
All poesy lands have their prose sides.
THE MALAYS AN OLD RACE.
Though the. Malay Peninsula was unknown to Europeans
till the arrival of the Portuguese in India about the year
1500, the race for weary ages possessed the knowledge of
letters, worked metals, domesticated and utiHzed animals,
cultivated fields, and led the commerce of the Pacific Ocean.
Their language
crops out not only in very remote islands to
the east, but according to the English ethnologist, Mr.
Brace, " in Madagascar, three thousand miles distant, the
Malay words form one-seventh of the vocabulary of the
islanders."
Dr. Prichard regarded it as settled that there was a
Malay-Polynesian race, which, at a period before the influx
of Hindooism, existed nearly in the state of the present New
Zealanders.
3Iarsden declares that the main portion of the old
" Malay is original, and not traceable to any foreign source."
Humboldt considered the Malay-Polynesian languages to
have been " primitively monosyllabic, with marked resemblances
to the Chinese."
Crawford^ who has made the Malays a study, says, after
speaking of the "immemorial antiquity of their language,"
that the art of converting iron into steel has been immemorially
known to the more civilized nations of the Malay Archipelago.
There are Sanscrit inscriptions in Java, and some
of the other INIalay-peopled islands. The Malay annals, a