For a long time, especially since the Dutch occupation, these old populations have received the special name of Alfuros.  But this ambiguous term has been used in such an arbitrary and promiscuous fashion that latterly it has been well-nigh banished from ethnological literature.  It is not long ago that the Negritos were so called.  But if the black peoples are eliminated, there remains on many islands at least an element to be differentiated from the Malay, chiefly through the darker skin color, greater orthocephaly, and more wavy, quite crimped hair.  I have, for the different islands, furnished proof, and will here only refer to the assertion that “a broad belt of wavy and curly hair has pressed itself in between the Papuan and the Malay, a belt which in the north seems to terminate with the Veddah, in the south with the Australian.”  One can not read the accounts of travelers without the increasing conviction of the existence of several different, if not perhaps related, varieties of peoples thrust on the same island.

[Theory of Negrito and three Malay invasions.] From this results the natural and entirely unprejudiced conclusion, which has repeatedly been stated, that either a primitive people by later intrusions has been pressed back into the interior or that in course of time several immigrations have followed one another.  At the same time it is not unreasonable to think that both processes went on at the same time, and indeed this conception is strongly brought forward.  So Blumentritt assumes that there is there a primitive black people and that three separate Malay invasions have taken place.  The oldest, whose branches have many traits in accord with the Dayaks of Borneo, especially the practice of head-hunting; a second, which also took place before the arrival of the Spaniards, to which the Tagals, Bisayas, Bicols, Ilocanos, and other tribes belong; the third, Islamitic, which emigrated from Borneo and might have been interrupted by the arrival of the Spaniards, and with which a contemporaneous immigration from the Moluccas went on.  It must be said, however, that Blumentritt admits two periods for the first invasion.  In the earliest he places the immigration of the Igorots, Apayos, Zambales—­in short, all the tribes that dwelt in the interior of the country later and were pressed away from the coast, therefore, actually, the mountain tribes.  To the second half he assigns the Tinguianes, Catalanganes, and Irayas, who are not head-hunters, but Semper says they appear to have a mixture of Chinese and Japanese blood.

Against this scheme many things may be said in detail, especially that, according to the apparently well-grounded assertions of Mueller-Beeck, the going of the Chinese to the Philippines was developed about the end of the fourteenth century, and chiefly after the Spaniards had gotten a foothold and were using the Mexican silver in trade.  At any rate, the apprehension of Semper, which rests on somewhat superficial physiognomic ground, is not confirmed by searching investigations.  So the head-hunting of the mountain tribes, so far as it hints at relations with Borneo, gives no sure chronological result, since it might have been contemporaneous in them and could have come here through invasion from other islands.