261. Oceania
From the Malay peninsula the vast island region of Oceania stretches eastward to within two thousand miles of America. Australia deserves to be set apart on account of its continental size, isolation, and ancient biological independence. Oceania proper falls into five natural divisions. These are Indonesia or Malaysia[38] or the East Indies, where large islands are scattered among many small ones; Papua or New Guinea; and three tracts of relatively small, widely separated islands rising out of the depths of the Pacific: Melanesia, a broken chain southeastward from New Guinea; Micronesia, to the northeast; and Polynesia, far eastward. Two primary facts stand out in regard to the inhabitants. Papua and Melanesia are peopled with blacks, the Oceanic Negroids; the other regions have brown inhabitants of prevailingly Mongoloid affiliations. Linguistically a single fundamental speech, the Malayo-Polynesian, prevails over all of Oceania except Papua, whose tongues so far as known fail to connect with any others or with one another. Large unanswered problems inhere in these distributions: how the Oceanic Negroids are related to those of Africa, from whom they are so remote geographically but whom they resemble so strikingly in type; how the black Melanesians came to talk dialects of Malayo-Polynesian,[39] which otherwise is a speech of brown peoples. More in detail, there are questions such as where and how the Polynesians developed their somewhat aberrant racial characteristics; what may be the relations of a more and a less specifically Mongoloid, a broader and a longer headed strain, among the East Indians; and whether the latter of these connects racially with the “Indo-Australians.”