For the reasons already mentioned, I elected to return by the way I had come, and had no reason to regret doing so. What if I did not see the Andaman Islands! they were places of little or no interest. A curse seemed to have rested on them. To begin with, their original inhabitants were few and far between; wretched specimens of humanity, at least morally and intellectually, if not physically; differing from anything I had been accustomed to—Cannibals! Upon this promising soil we then grafted the noblest types of the scum of India—mutineers, murderers and Dacoits. That is to say, we focused on one spot all that was worse than cannibalism, there to dream of vengeance, and pass the remainder of their lives feeding on their dire hatred of mankind in general, and every other passion likely to convert them into incarnate devils, ten times worse than they had been before. Many were sent there because they attempted to recover their country from the iron rule of the usurper; others, because they acted up to the teachings of their childhood. Could we but form an idea of the evil passions which surged up in the bosoms of those Asiatics torn by force from their own land, I believe that even Dante’s immortal conception of the Inferno would pale its ineffectual fire before that seething cauldron of pent-up human rage. Before the advent of these horrors, the islands, even if we throw cannibalism into the balance, must have been infinitely better than our convict system has since made them. That such a distinct race of people should have been confined to these islands, part of the same chain as included the Nicobars, Sumatra and Java, was also passing strange. The researches of Prichard and Latham point to the origin of the various human types from a single pair, the differences being due to the influence of climate, food and a variety of other circumstances; and if this was the case, the divergence of the Andamanese from Malay characteristics, considering their geographical proximity, is still more unaccountable. But other ethnologists—Camper of the Dutch school, the originator of the _facial angle_ test of intelligence; Blumenbach of the vertical system; and Morton of American fame—incline to the belief in separate origins and subsequent fusion by intercommunication. Science has yet much to account for in this direction.