George Eliot has declared that "the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history." In the advance of the world's civilization from crude savagery to high culture, woman's part, though of incalculable value, has, generally speaking, been unheralded. Bearing the brunt of the downward burden, while man's shoulder presses upward, woman, from the beginning, has had a minor place in written history. But even among the obscurer races she has managed to bear her part with marked happiness. This seems to be notably true among the island women of the world. The peoples of the seas, removed from many of the pressing conditions and harsh frictions which are present in the larger countries of the continent, exhibit a freedom, if the term may be justly applied to undeveloped races, which is not the possession of many of the larger and older nations of men. One is prepared, of course, for great variety of blood, custom, and development among the peoples who inhabit the islands and the lands that lie out of the beaten track of travel and commerce. There is probably no part of the world where the races of mankind have become more mixed than in the South Seas. The women of the Indo-Pacific area belong to certain great classes or groups of humanity. First, the Australian, inhabiting the great island continent that seems to be the southeastern extension of Asia; they are considered the lowest among the races of mankind, have black skins, but not woolly hair, and are looked upon as a distinct race. Second, come the Papuan women, who are in every respect negroes, resembling their kindred in Africa in the variety of their types, including the tall, very woolly-headed people of New Guinea, who have black skins and comely bodies. Of the same race, but differing greatly in ethnic characteristics, are the pigmy people of the Andaman Islands, of the Malay Peninsula, and of the Philippines. Third, the brown Polynesians, who are among the finest looking people on the face of the earth; they inhabit the groups of small islands all about the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to Samoa. Fourth and finally, the Malays proper, who are a small, wiry, energetic people of southeastern Asia and the great islands lying around Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and the Philippines. The eight million people (called Filipinos) in the last-named islands are, as will be seen later, of mixed blood, a compound of all the sub-species of humanity, brown, black, yellow, and white, even a small sprinkling of American Indian blood being there. Women of so great admixture of blood must necessarily exhibit wide differences of personal appearance and of inherited as well as acquired traits.