Although In The Last Quarter Of A Century Much Has Been Accomplished By Ethnology, Still For Years To Come Borneo, Especially The Dutch Part Of It, Will Remain A Prolific Field For Research.

The tribes are difficult to classify, and in Dutch Borneo undoubtedly additional groups are to be found.

The Muruts in the north, who use irrigation in their rice culture and show physical differences from the others, are still little known. Many tribes in Dutch Borneo have never been studied. So recently as 1913 Mr. Harry C. Raven, an American zoological collector, in crossing the peninsula that springs forth on the east coast about 1 N.L., came across natives, of the Basap tribe, who had not before been in contact with whites. The problem of the Indonesians is far from solved, nor is it known who the original inhabitants of Borneo were, Negritos or others, and what role, if any, the ancestors of the Polynesians played remains to be discovered.

The generally accepted idea has been that the Malays inhabit the coasts and the Dayaks the interior. This is not strictly correct because the racial problems of the island are much more complicated. Doctor A.C. Haddon recognises five principal groups of people in Sarawak, Punan, Kenyah-Kayan, Iban or Sea Dayak, Malay, and the remaining tribes he comprehends under the noncommittal name Klemantan. He distinguishes two main races, a dolichocephalic and a brachycephalic, terming the former Indonesian, the latter Proto-Malay.

Doctor A.W. Nieuwenhuis, who about the end of the last century made important researches in the upper parts of the Kapuas and Mahakam Rivers and at Apo Kayan, found the Ot-Danum, Bahau-Kenyah, and Punan to be three distinct groups of that region.

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