nication for business purposes between the inhabitants of different races.[1]
This 'Malaya' then (if I may, at least on this occasion, use the word) being our fiell, we have to consider what work has been already done in it, and what remains to be done.
And in speaking of work already accomplished, I must hasten to do honour to one great name, which such a Society as this must always hold in the greatest respect—it is almost needless to say I mean the name of J. R. Logan. No doubt there were great men who came before him here; men who were possessed of scientific knowledge, and patient observation, and intellectual power, and who brought these great gifts to bear upon the manifold wonders which nature has accumulated in this part of the world; and in their writings gave to their own time, and to posterity, the benefit of their labour and research. Mr. Logan had his predecessors, "Vixêre fortes ante Agamemnona multi," and we have not to lament with the poet, at least in the case of all of them, that they lie overshadowed by the long night of oblivion, nuwept and unknown. Marsden, Leyden, Raffles, Newbold, not to mention Portuguese and Dutch travellers who came before them, will ever he illustrious names in the history of these countries. But to Mr. Logan belongs the special honour of having not only observed much, and thought much, and written much himself, but also of having associated together with himself other thinkers, and of having contrived a plan by which the knowledge acquired by some of his contemporaries and fellow residents in this Colony, and in the neighbouring Settlements, might be recorded and published. This was, as you know, by means of the "Journal of the Indian Archipelago." The town of Penang justly boasts of its handsome memorial of this remarkable man; but the most enduring and the most worthy monument of him is his own Journal, of which for 15 years, from 1847 to 1862, he was the Editor, and to the papers of which he was also the principal contributor. If there is any member of this Society who has not yet done so, I would recommend him to read the introductory article in the first number, from Mr. Logan's own pen, upon "The present condition of the Indian Archipelago." I think he cannot fail to rise from the perusal of it full of admiration of the genius and culture of the
- ↑ In connection with this point the following passage from Mr. Logan's writings may be of interest:—"If the word "Malay" be confined to the Malays and their language; and the word "Malayan" be exclusively used as a generic term for all the races and languages of what the French call Malaisie, we may dispense with the indefinite word "Archipelago" (Journal I. A. vol : III p. 229.)
