e
western half belongs to Holland.

[Sidenote: Information as to the natives of German New Guinea.]

Our information as to the natives of German New Guinea is very
fragmentary, and is confined almost entirely to the tribes of the coast.
As to the inhabitants of the interior we know as yet very little.
However, German missionaries and others have described more or less
fully the customs and beliefs of the natives at various points of this
long coast, and I shall extract from their descriptions some notices of
that particular aspect of the native religion with which in these
lectures we are specially concerned. The points on the coast as to which
a certain amount of ethnographical information is forthcoming are, to
take them in the order from west to east, Berlin Harbour, Potsdam
Harbour, Astrolabe Bay, the Maclay Coast, Cape King William, Finsch
Harbour, and the Tami Islands in Huon Gulf. I propose to say something
as to the natives at each of these points, beginning with Berlin
Harbour, the most westerly of them.

[Sidenote: The island of Tumleo.]

Berlin Harbour is formed by a group of four small islands, which here
lie off the coast. One of the islands bears the name of Tumleo or
Tamara, and we possess an excellent account of the natives of this
island from the pen of a Catholic missionary, Father Mathias Josef
Erdweg,[358] which I shall draw upon in what follows. We have also a
paper by a German ethnologist, the late Mr. R. Parkinson, on the same
subject,[359] but his information is in part derived from Father Erdweg
and he appears to have erred by applying too generally the statements
which Father Erdweg strictly limited to the inhabitants of Tumleo.[360]

[Sidenote: The natives of Tumleo, their material and artistic culture.]

The island of Tumleo lies in 142 deg. 25" of East Longitude and 3 deg. 15" of
South Latitude, and is distant about sixty sea-miles from the
westernmost point of German New Guinea. It is a coral island, surrounded
by a barrier reef and rising for the most part only a few feet above the
sea.[361] In stature the natives fall below the average European height;
but they are well fed and strongly built. Their colour varies from black
to light brown. Their hair is very frizzly. Women and children wear it
cut short; men wear it done up into wigs. They number less than three
hundred, divided into four villages. The population seems to have
declined through wars, disease, and infanticide.[362] Li