are Pagans. Still their language is
essentially Malay; and their physical conformation passes into that of
the Malays by numerous transitions.
_c._ Thirdly, we find in Borneo the _Dyaks_. Many of these are as much
fairer than the Malays as the Semang are darker. Their language,
however, belongs to the Malay class; whilst their religion and
civilization may reasonably be supposed to be that of the Malays
previous to the influences of Brahminism from India, Mahometanism from
Arabia, and the changes effected in their habits, language, and
appearance effected thereby.
It is not too much to say that within the peninsula of Malaya, the
Johore Archipelago, and the island of Borneo, each of these types, and
every intermediate form as well, is to be found.
_Malacca._--The town of Malacca is a town of Mahometan Malays, but I
believe that the eastern parts of Wellesley province are on the frontier
of the _Jokong_, _Jakon_, or _Jakun_. These are _Orang Binua_, or
aborigines--at least as compared with the true Malays.
In the eighth century--I am drawing an illustration from the history of
our own island, and its relations to continental Germany--the
Anglo-Saxons of Great Britain, themselves originally Pagan Germans, took
an interest in the spiritual welfare of the so-called Old Saxons, a
tribe of Westphalia, immediately related to their own continental
ancestors, these Old Saxons having retained their primitive Paganism.
The mission partly succeeded, and partly failed.
Now, if in addition to this partial success of the Anglo-Saxon mission,
there had been a partial Anglo-Saxon colonization as well, and if, side
by side with this, fragments of the old unmodified Paganism had survived
amongst the fens and forests up to the present time, we should have had,
in the relations of England and Germany, precisely what I imagine to
have been the case with the Malayan peninsula and the island of Sumatra.
Like Germany, the peninsula would have supplied the original stock to
the island; but, in the island, that stock would have undergone certain
modifications. With these modifications it would--so to say--have been
_reflected_ back upon the continent--_re_-colonizing the old
mother-country. Now just what the Old Saxons of Westphalia were to the
Anglo-Saxons of the eighth century, are the Jakun to the true Malays.
They differ from them in being something other than Mahometan; _i.e._,
in being nearly what the Mahometan Malays were before
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