A grammar of the Malayan language, with an introduction and praxis..

XX INTRODUCTION.
estranged from their bretliren by the acquisition of foreign ha-
bits, and again frequenting them under the advantages of their
new condition.
In one respect, however, the analogy fails ; for whilst we
possess some historical account of the expeditions which contri-
buted to people Great Britain with its present race, we are en-
tirely without record or tradition of the course of population
amongst these islands, prior to the comparatively modern pas-
sage of the Malays from Sumatra to the opposite shores of the
peninsula^ at a period when their language had already received
those accessions which distinguish it from the generahty of the
insular dialects. Whether, in times much earlier, tribes of Bat-
tas, Rejcaigs, or JLampongs migrated to Java, Borneo, and the
Moluccas, or whether the current ran in a contrary direction
and conveyed inhabitants to Sumatra from the more eastern
islands, must remain to be decided upon grounds of general
probability alone, although some of the superstitious tales of the
natives of the Philippines point to the former as the birth-place
of the parents of the human race. (Hist, of Sumatra, ed. 3.
p. 302.) But whatever pretensions any particular spot may
have to precedence in this respect, the so wide dissemination of
a language common to all, bespeaks a high degree of antiquity,
and gives a claim to originality as far as we can venture to apply
that term, which signifies no more than the state beyond which
we have not the means, either historically or by fair inference,
of tracing the origin. In this restricted sense it is that we are
justified in consi(!ering the main portion of the Malayan as ori-
ginal or indigenous ; its affinity to any continental tongue not
having yet been shewn ; and least of all can we suppose it con-
nected