Yet with their infantile arithmetic these paradoxical islanders have contrived to develop an astonishingly intricate form of speech characterised by an absolutely bewildering superfluity of pronominal and other elements. Thus the possessive pronouns have as many as sixteen possible variants according to the class of noun (human objects, parts of the body, degrees of kinship, etc.) with which they are in agreement. For instance, _my_ is _dia_, _dot_, _dong_, _dig_, _dab_, _dar_, _daka_, _doto_, _dai_, _dar_, _ad_, _ad-en_, _deb_, with _man_, _head_, _wrist_, _mouth_, _father_, _son_, _step-son_, _wife_, etc. etc.; and so with _thy_, _his_, _our_, _your_, _their_! This grouping of nouns in classes is analogous to the Bantu system, and it is curious to note that the number of classes is about the same. On the other hand there is a wealth of postfixes attached as in normal agglutinating forms of speech, so that "in adding their affixes they follow the principles of the ordinary agglutinative tongues; in adding their prefixes they follow the well-defined principles of the South African tongues. Hitherto, as far as I know, the two principles in full play have never been found together in any other language.... In Andamanese both are fully developed, so much so as to interfere with each other's grammatical functions[348]." The result often is certain _sesquipedalia verba_ comparable in length to those of the American polysynthetic languages. A savage people, who can hardly count beyond two, possessed of about the most intricate language spoken by man, is a psychological puzzle which I cannot profess to fathom. In the Malay Peninsula the indigenous element is certainly the Negrito, who, known by many names--Semang, Udai, Pangan, Hami, Menik or Mandi--forms a single ethnical group presenting some striking analogies with the Andamanese. But, surrounded from time out of mind by Malay peoples, some semi-civilised, some nearly as wild as themselves, but all alike slowly crowding them out of the land, these aborigines have developed defensive qualities unneeded by the more favoured insular Negritoes, while their natural development has been arrested at perhaps a somewhat lower plane of culture. In fact, doomed to extinction before their time came, they never have had a chance in the race, as Hugh Clifford sings in _The Song of the Last Semangs_: The paths are rough, the trails are blind The Jungle People tread; The yams are scarce and hard to find With which our folk are fed. We suffer yet a little space Until we pass away, The relics of an ancient race That ne'er has had its day.