comprised in this number, but the whole of these does not exceed 19,000.
Of this number about 600 only are European` Spaniards, with some few foreigners: the remainder are divided into various classes, of which the principal are, 1st, The Negroes, or aborigines; 2d, the Malays (or Indians, as they are called by the Spaniards); and the Mestizos and Creoles, who are about as 1 to 5 of the Indian population.
The Negroes [i.e., Negritos][1] are in all probability the original inhabitants of these islands, as they appear at some remote epoch to have been of almost all the eastern archipelago. The tide of Malay emigration, from whatever cause and part it proceeded, has on some islands entirely destroyed them. Others, as New Guinea, it has not yet reached, a circumstance which seems to point to the west as the original cradle of the Malay race. In the Phillippines, it has driven them from the coast to the mountains, which by augmenting the difficulty of procuring subsistence, may have much diminished their numbers. Still, however, they form a distinct, and perhaps a more numerous class of men than is generally suspected. They have in the present day undisturbed possession of nearly 2/3ds of the Island of Luzon, and of others a still larger proportion.
These people are small in stature, some of them almost dwarfish, woolly-headed, and thick-lipped, like the negroes of Africa, to whom indeed they bear
- ↑ The fullest and most authoritative account of the Negritos is, of course, the monograph by W. A. Reed, The Negritos of Zambales, published by the Philippine Ethnological Survey. See also Worcester's account of them in his "Non-Christian Tribes of Northern Luzon," in Philippine Journal of Science, October, 1906, pp. 805 et seq.—Eds.
