We have as yet a very imperfect knowledge of the ethnological history of New Guinea. Speaking very broadly, it is generally admitted that the bulk of the population belongs to the Papuan race, a dark-skinned, woolly-haired people who have also spread over western Oceania; but, to a greater or less extent, New Guinea has been subject to cultural and racial influences from all sides, except from Australia, where the movement has been the other way. Thus the East Indian archipelago has directly affected parts of Netherlands New Guinea, and its influence is to be traced to a variable degree in localities in the Bismarck archipelago, German New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelm's Land), Western Oceania, and British New Guinea or Papua, as it is termed officially.
The south-eastern peninsula of New Guinea--or at all events the coastal regions--has been largely affected by immigrants, who were themselves a mixed people, and who came later at various times. It is to these immigrants that Mr. Ray and I applied the term Melanesian (Ray, S. H., and Haddon, A. C., "A Study of the Languages of Torres Straits," _Proc. Roy. Irish Acad._, 3rd ser., IV., 1897, p. 509). Early in 1894, Mr. Ray read a paper before the Anthropological Institute (_Journ. Anth. Inst._, XXIV., p. 15), in which he adhered to our former discrimination of two linguistic stocks and added a third type of language composed of a mixture of the other two, for which he proposed the name Melano-Papuan. These languages, according to Mr. Ray, occur in the Trobriands, Woodlarks and the Louisiades, and similar languages are found in the northern Solomon Islands. For some years I had been studying the decorative art of British New Guinea, and from physical and artistic and other cultural reasons had come to the conclusion that the Melanesians of British New Guinea should be broken up into two elements: one consisting of the Motu and allied Melanesians, and the other of the inhabitants of the Massim district--an area extending slightly beyond that of Mr. Ray's Melano-Papuans ("The Decorative Art of British New Guinea," _Cunningham Memoirs_, X., _Roy. Irish Acad._, 1894, pp. 253-269). I reinforced my position six years later ("Studies in the Anthropo-geography of British New Guinea," _Journ. Roy. Geog. Soc._, 1900, pp. 265, 414). Dr. Seligmann, in his valuable paper "A Classification of the Natives of British New Guinea" (_Journ. Roy. Anth. Inst._, XXXIX., 1909, pp. 246, 315) corroborated these views and designated the two groups of "Melanesians" as the Eastern and Western Papuo-Melanesians. The following year he published the great book to which Mr. Williamson so frequently refers, and in which this classification is maintained, and these two groups together with the Papuans, are termed Papuasians.