footsteps. After a windy night, that nasty-looking Chinese delicacy the sea-slug
was sometimes thrown up on the beach, which was at such times thickly strewn
with some of the most beautiful shells that adorn our cabinets, along with
fragments and masses of coral and strange sponges, of which I picked up more
than twenty different sorts. In many cases sponge and coral are so much alike
that it is only on touching them that they can be distinguished. Quantities of
seaweed, too, are thrown up; but strange as it may seem, these are far less
beautiful and less varied than may be found on any favourable part of our own
coasts.
The natives here, even those who seem to be of pare Papuan race, were much
more reserved and taciturn than those of Ke. This is probably because I only saw
them as yet among strangers and in small parties, One must see the savage at
home to know what he really is. Even here, however, the Papuan character
sometimes breaks out. Little boys sing cheerfully as they walk along, or talk
aloud to themselves (quite a negro characteristic); and try all they can, the men
cannot conceal their emotions in the true Malay fashion. A number of them were
one day in my house, and having a fancy to try what sort of eating tripang would
be, I bought a couple, paying for them with such an extravagant quantity of
tobacco that the seller saw I was a green customer. He could not, however,
conceal his delight, but as he smelt the fragrant weed, and exhibited the large
handful to his companions, he grinned and twisted and gave silent chuckles in a
most expressive pantomime. I had often before made the same mistake in paying
a Malay for some trifle. In no case, however, was his pleasure visible on his
countenance—a dull and stupid hesitation only showing his surprise, which
would be exhibited exactly in the same way whether he was over or under paid.
These little moral traits are of the greatest interest when taken in connexion with
physical features. They do not admit of the same ready explanation by external
causes which is so frequently applied to the latter. Writers on the races of
mankind have too often to trust to the information of travellers who pass rapidly
from country to country, and thus have few opportunities of becoming
acquainted with peculiarities of national character, or even of ascertaining what
is really the average physical conformation of the people. Such are exceedingly
apt to be deceived in places where two races have long, intermingled, by looking
on intermediate forms and mixed habits as evidences of a natural transition from
one race to the other, instead of an artificial mixture of two distinct peoples; and
they will be the more readily led into this error if, as in the present case, writers
on the subject should have been in the habit of classing these races as mere
varieties of one stock, as closely related in physical conformation as from their