With only a short time at a place it is evident that an exhaustive
study of the people of any particular locality could not be made. But
the culture plane of the entire area is practically the same, and
the facts as here presented should give a good idea of the customs
and the general condition of the Negritos of Zambales Province. The
short time at my disposal for the investigation is my only excuse
for the meager treatment given some lines of study--as, for example,
physical anthropology and language.
Inasmuch as nothing has yet been published by The Ethnological Survey
on the Negritos of the Philippines, I have thought it not out of
place to preface my report with an introductory chapter on their
distribution. The data contained therein have been compiled by me
from information gathered by the Survey during the past two years
and are sufficiently authentic for the present purpose.
The photographs of the Zambales Negritos were made by Mr. J. Diamond
and those of the Bataan Negritos are from the collection of Hon. Dean
C. Worcester, Secretary of the Interior. Credit for each photograph
is given on the plate as it appears.
CHAPTER I
DISTRIBUTION OF NEGRITOS
Probably no group of primitive men has attracted more attention from
the civilized world than the pygmy blacks. From the time of Homer and
Aristotle the pygmies, although their existence was not absolutely
known at that early period, have had their place in fable and legend,
and as civilized man has become more and more acquainted with the
unknown parts of the globe he has met again and again with the same
strange type of the human species until he has been led to conclude
that there is practically no part of the tropic-zone where these
little blacks have not lived at some time.
Mankind at large is interested in a race of dwarfs just as it would
be in a race of giants, no matter what the color or social state; and
scientists have long been concerned with trying to fix the position of
the pygmies in the history of the human race. That they have played an
important ethnologic role can not be doubted; and although to-day they
are so scattered and so modified by surrounding people as largely to
have disappeared as a pure type, yet they have everywhere left their
imprint on the peoples who have absorbed them.
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