Five islands, Amiui, Kadamat, Kilian, Chetlat, and Bitra, with a total area of 6f or 7 square miles, are attached to the South Canara district ; and other five, Agathi, Kowrathy, Kalpeni, Androt, and Minekoi, with an area of 7i to 8 square miles, are under the Bibi of Cannanore. All the islands have lagoons. The population numbered, in 1871, 13,495 ; a few read the Koran in Arabic. Accord ing to Lassen, the language of the Laccadives and Maldives belongs to the Turanian family. It is Malayalam written in the Arabic character. They catch fish, turtle, and the holothuria. Grave crime is almost unknown. Rats swarm on the islands, and a revenue officer introduced the mun goose, species of Herpestes, and large owls to keep them down, as the rats were destroying the grain crops on the ground and the cocoanuts on the trees. In 1871 the islands were flooded dur ing a storm, and a steamer laden with rice was sent to them, and in 1875 an hospital assistant and midwife were sent.
Andaman Islands have an area of 880'2 square miles, and a population in 1881 of 14,628, of whom 7440 were convicts on the penal settlement. The Andaman Islands lie in the direct track of ships navigating the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal, and have been twice actually occupied by a British establishment. Their inhabitants, the Mincopi, had the feeling of hostility and aversion towards strangers which is common to all the wilder Papuan tribes. They long continued to be bitterly hostile to the colony of 1855. They are savages of a type lower than that of any of all the other races in the south and east of Asia, or even of the whole world. Few of them exceed five feet in height. Their lower limbs are spare and ill- 1 proportioned, their bellies protuberant, the com plexion deep black, and the hair woolly. They have also a taste, so characteristic of the wilder Papuans, for daubing their heads with red ochre. They have canoes, but use small rafts when they wish to visit the islets. Both sexes go entirely naked, for the pieces of fringe that they wear about them are rather intended for ornament than as a covering. They obtain fish by descending to the shore at low water and spearing those that are left among the reefs by the receding tide, also shooting them with bows and arrows, and catching them with small hand-nets, and deposit ing them in long wicker baskets which they carry slung from their shoulders. All these are cha racteristics of the wilder coast Papuans, especially those who formerly occupied Tasmania, to whom, indeed, the Mincopi bear a resemblance so striking as to excite surprise that two tribes who must have been separated during many ages, and who reside in climates so different, should be distin guished by precisely the same characteristics.
The only point of difference that can be detected consists in the knowledge on the part of the Andamans of the use of the bow and arrow, which was either never known to the Van Die men's Land natives, or had been neglected in favour of the dart or throwing spear, which is far better adapted to the open nature of their country.
A large number of Mincopi who visited Ross Island during the Editor's stay in 1863 evinced great facility iu imitating vocal sounds. They (Mincopi) roam in tribes, who speak different dialects unintelligible to each other ; one of , their dialects has been called Bojingijida. The tribes are at enmity with each other. The inhabit ants of the Southern Andaman erect no houses, those of the Little Andaman erect beehive huts of the rudest character. Their marriage ceremony is extremely short and simple ; their dead are interred immediately after death, or placed on a raised platform, and the site where the death occurred is abandoned. After two months, the bonei of the deceased are cleaned and distributed, to be suspended round the neck, seemingly as charms. Women have sometimes a slight cincture of leaves, a bunch of which is suspended from the waist-belt behind. There are kitchen rniddens, some of great dimensions,one being 300 yards long, 50 yards broad, and 10 feet high, composed of shells and the bones of birds. The zoology is identical with that of Burma.
The Malay Peninsula is also known as the Eastern Peninsula, to distinguish it from the Western Peninsula of India. It is a long, narrow, mountainous tract, varying in breadth from 50 to 150 miles, and about 700 miles in length, on the east from Bankok at the bead of the Gulf of Siam, in let. 13° 58' 30" N., and long. 100° 34' E., and on the west from the Tavoy river to Cape Ramunia, in lat. 1° 22' 30" N. The mountains of the interior rise 5000 and 6000 feet in height above the sea, one of them, Ladang, which the Portuguese named Mount Ophir, being 5600 feet high. The metallic ores obtainable are gold and tin, the latter in great abundance, and it is probably from the gold obtainable that the Peninsula has been supposed to be the Aurea Chersonesus. Newbold says (i. p. 431) that the Two distinct races are in that peninsula and its adjacent islands, the Mongoloid, Mon, Siamese, and Malay, with the Negroid, Mincopi, and Semang. The tribes of the Mongoloid race are Numerous, but are in places so few in numbers that a hut or two form a nation. They are of little political or ethnical importance. In the states bordering on Siam, the bulk of the popu lation consists of the Malay, Siamese, and Samsam, the latter being Siamese converts to Muham madanism, who have adopted the language, the habits, and manners of the Malays.