A grammar and dictionary of the Malay language : with a preliminary ...

clxxxii DISSERTATION.
expects a reply, that of the Australians being an emigration
from some distant land. It is quite enough to say that there is
no trace of such a people, or of such languages as theirs, in any
other known part of the world, and that to fancy that the
feeblest and rudest of mankind, whose skill does not extend
to the hollowing of the trunk of a tree into a canoe to cross
a river, should have been able, when, probably, even ruder than
now, to have crossed broad seas, or any seas, in order to reach
their present home, is hardly reasonable.
I have carefully gone over the lists, of various length, of about
thirty languages of all the discovered parts of Australia, in
quest of Malayan words, but in none of them have I found a
single word, or the trace or semblance of one. They might
have been expected in the language of Raffles' Bay, not distant
from the scene of the Tripang fisheries of the natives of Celebes
but they are equally absent from this, as from the other lan-
guages. Although the Tripang fishers occasionally see natives
of Australia, they hold no intercourse with them; and, from
what I know of the opinions and prejudices of the former, I am
satisfied they would no more think of a social intercourse with
them, than with the kangaroos or wild dogs of the same country.
Having now rendered such a sketch of the languages in which
Malay and Javanese words are found, as I have been able, I
procBcd to ofler somc observations on the migrations or
Migrations
^'^"
?Iyan wauderiugs through which such words have come to be
nations.
disseminated. In this inquiry language must atl'oid the
chief evidence ; but I shall also endeavour to draw assistance from
the ascertained character of the various tribes concerned, and
from the physical characteristics of the countries they occupy.
It is to be supposed that any civilisation worth adopting by
other nations must have begun and spread in the Indian Archi-
pelago, as in other parts of the globe, from one or more given
points, and as the Malay and Javanese languages are the only
two that are mixed with the languages of distant tribes, I have
placed the foci from which such civilisation emanated in the
great islands of Sumatra and Java, the pi'incipal nations of
which were far in advance of all tlicir neighbours when authen-
tic information respecting tlic Archipelago was first obtained.
;