Note 5 — Introductory.

On this question of race and idiom unity Zúñiga, whom I cite frequently in this sketch, says that the vocabularies of New Zealand, New Holland, New Guinea, and part of New Hebrides (gathered by Captain Cook) were all easily understood by him through his familiarity with Philippine dialects; that, moreover, from his knowledge of the racial and linguistic characteristics of nearly all South Sea islanders, especially of the peoples from Madagascar to Easter Island, including (he distinctly declares) the natives of the Friendly, or Society Isles, of the Sandwich and Marquesas groups, he was of opinion that aboriginal stock of all, in tongue and blood, including even the natives of Central America, was Aeta, or Papuan, otherwise styled (in the Philippines) Negrito.5 As far back as the early part of the seventeenth century this same question of race and language identity of the Philippine people was treated by the Jesuit Chirino, of whom we shall say more further on; then later by another Jesuit scholar, at one time provincial superior of his society in the Philippines, Francisco Colín, in his Lavor evangelica, (Madrid, 1663); and by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, a linguist of deserved eminence in the world of letters, formerly Jesuit. See his Catalogo (in six quarto vols., Madrid, 1800–1805), and you will learn very much about many strange things, among others, that the theory maintained by the English Wallace, the German Blumentritt, and later ethnologists, as to the identity of these Polynesians—Papuans and Malays—perhaps the only one now held by scholars—is venerably old, by two centuries and more. But really, in view of the apparently irreconcilable opinions of linguists on this topic, further discussion of it seems unprofitable.