C.
THE OCEANIC MONGOLIDÆ.
The epithet Oceanic is applied to this group because, with the exception of the Peninsula of Malacca, the tribes belonging to it are the inhabitants of islands exclusively.
DIVISIONS.
The ocean is the highway between tribe and tribe, or nation and nation, just in proportion as there is the skill, the experience, the courage and the necessary equipment for using it. As long as the mariner's compass was undiscovered the New World was isolated from the Old. To the Turk on the Hellespont, in the deficiency of even the rudest elements of water-transport, the narrow stream was an obstacle. Hence the unscientific character of all a priori generalizations respecting the influence of land or water as the means of national intercommunication, or as elements of ethnographical dispersions. The desert, the prairie, or the ocean, are boundaries that limit, or paths that extend, the diffusion of tribes and nations, just in proportion as there is the camel, the horse, or the ship to make them available.
How nations may effect an extension over continuous tracts of land, has been seen in the examination of the Great Turk area; how nations may effect an extension where the land is disconnected, and where the ocean alone is the means of communication, will be seen in the examination of the great Oceanic area. These two forms of extension stand in strong contrast to one another.
The best way to appreciate the magnitude of the great Oceanic area, is to state that with the exception of the Mauritius, the Isle of Bourbon, Ceylon, the Seychelles, the Maldives, and the Laccadives in the Indian Ocean, and the Japanese empire with the islands to the north thereof, in the Chinese Sea, every inhabited spot of land in the Indian and Pacific Oceans is inhabited by tribes of one and the same race.
Or taking the localities more in detail, we may say that from Madagascar, on the west, to Easter Island, half way between Asia and America, and from Formosa to the north, to New Zealand southwards, in the great islands of Borneo, Sumatra, and New Guinea, in the almost continental extent of Australia, in groups like the Philippines and the Moluccas, and in scattered clusters like the Mariannes or the other islands of the South Sea, the race is one and the same—and that race Oceanic.
Add to all this, that those tribes which are found so widely spread over the face of the ocean, are so spread almost exclusively. They are not only everywhere in the islands, but they are well-nigh nowhere on the continent. In the Peninsula of Malacca, and on no other part of the main land of Asia, is an Oceanic tribe to be detected.