One of the greatest mysteries in the prehistoric past of Man is the Malayan colonization of the large island of Madagascar. Madagascar lies off the east coast of Africa at a minimum distance of 300 miles. Between the north-west corner of the island and the East African mainland lies the archipelago of the Comoro islands, which assist to some extent to bridge the interval. So far as our researches go, there is no evidence in Madagascar of ancient human inhabitants. The island was probably uninhabited by man until the arrival of the Malagasy from Sumatra or Java, though, more or less simultaneously, negroes from eastern Africa were arriving on the west coast of Madagascar, either in their own canoes, or more probably in the sailing vessels of the Arabs who were trading up and down the east coast of Africa from perhaps as early as 1000 B.C. But the unsolved problem is, How did the Malagasy tribes reach this island at different periods between an approximate 500 B.C. and 500 A.C.? Their language affinities[12] show that they must have come from Sumatra or Java. Physically the Malagasy of pure race—like the Hova tribes—unmixed (as so many of them are along the eastern side of the central plateau) with negro, Indian, or Arab blood, resemble pretty closely the Malay types of Sumatra and Java. We can understand the Malay and Indonesian conquest of Oceania. In the relatively calm, island-studded Pacific Ocean it is not an impossible task for men to sail on from island to island in large canoes with outriggers and decks, and with masts and sails, and thus to reach in their migrations to within 2000 or 3000 miles of North or South America, and 5000 or 6000 miles from their starting-point. But it is a different matter to cross in a direct line the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean from Java or Sumatra to Madagascar, with no convenient islands to halt at by the way. It is true that there is the little Chagos group, leading to the Mascarene archipelago of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodriguez; but on no one of these islands has there been found any trace of the former presence of human inhabitants before the arrival of the Portuguese, Dutch, and French. It seems more probable therefore that the excursions and adventures of the Sumatran and Javan Malays (inspired to some extent as they may have been by the mysterious Indonesians coming from Indo-China, who settled at some unknown date in Sumatra and the more eastern islands of the Malay archipelago, and were the progenitors of the Polynesians) first took a western direction in crossing the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon and southern India; thence passing on to the Maldiv archipelago, and so to the Seychelles and farther to the Almirante Islands and the north end of Madagascar. But there is very little evidence of a positive nature to support this theory, except it be the slightly “Malay” look about the people of the Maldiv group and the scanty remains of ancient human