New Guinea, four hundred years ago, and its adjacent islands, large and small, of Waigiu, Aru, Timor-laut, the Admiralty Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago (once known as New Britain and New Ireland), and the Solomon Islands were peopled almost entirely by NEGROIDS, that is to say by Oceanic Negroes, Papuans, and Negritos, similar to the inland populations of the eastern Malay islands. The Papuans were a tall race, with abundant bushy hair of woolly texture and with arched, almost Jewish noses. Their skins were very dark, and their appearance (except for the high nose), their noisy dispositions, love of excitement and laughter, reminded travellers very much of African Negroes. The Oceanic Negroes of the Bismarck Archipelago only differed from the Papuans in being more "negro", with more tightly curled hair and flatter noses. The Negritos were like the pigmy Negroes of Africa. But here and there on the coast of New Guinea, or on the islands off it, were obvious Polynesian settlements of old times, and even on some isolated island a people quite pale skinned and Caucasian in appearance. The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, of New Caledonia, and the Fiji archipelago are allied to the Papuans more than to any other stock, but are usually known as MELANESIANS.[19] Their characteristics when first discovered by Europeans (which for purposes of accurate description was not much more than one hundred years ago) were not quite so "negro" as those of the Papuans and the Negritos. They had dark, almost black skins and broad noses, but the head-hair was less tightly curled and grew to greater length. They had often the very prominent brow ridges of the Australoid, and some indications also of mixture with a higher race--the semi-Caucasian Polynesian--and were no doubt the result of an early mixture of all these types. The civilization of the Melanesians was somewhat higher than that of the Papuans, but inferior to the arts and industries and social life of the POLYNESIANS. They had developed agriculture to some extent, and amongst cultivated plants had the taro yam (a kind of Arum with tuberous roots), the Sweet potato (a Convolvulus), the sugar cane, the Bread-fruit tree,[20] the banana, the coconut palm, the sweet roots of a tree-lily (_Dracæna_), and the fruit of a Pandanus; perhaps also the Kava pepper vine. They possessed as domestic animals a pig of an east Asiatic species and a dog of a type like the pariah dog of India or the Dingo of Australia. They also had fowls of a game bantam type, which no doubt had been brought eastward by Malay traders till they passed from island to island into Melanesia, and even to most of the Polynesian islands _except_ New Zealand. In New Caledonia there were fowls of a big breed but there were no pigs or dogs. [The domestic fowl was even found in the remote Easter Island when it was first visited by Europeans, but had not got beyond that to South America; neither had