The islands of Indonesia are of exceeding interest to the ethnologist for a variety of reasons. This is an ancient area of human habitation, where the history of man runs back to its very beginnings. Java Man stands at the head of Indonesian genealogy, and he lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. Since then, countless waves of migrants have moved into the islands. The ancestors of the primitive Tasmaniane and Australians, the Oceanic Negroes of Melanesia, and the Polynesians of the Pacific all trod the soil of the Indies in long past ages. The texture of history is deep here, deeper than almost anywhere else on earth.

At A time when the whole political system of Southeast Asia seems to be on the verge of complete reshapement and when a new cycle of development, dominated by native forces, may be expected to emerge from the present turmoil, an inquiry into the ideological foundations of native government will not be out of place and, perhaps, will even be of more than purely theoretical interest. What were the religious and philosophical conceptions which underlay and shaped the states of Southeast Asia? Are they still living forces with which we have to count or are they dead and gone? Is it possible to inoculate new ideas into old traditions, thereby avoiding a complete break with the past, a dangerous uprooting of oriental thought and culture?

Netherlands indies occupies a position somewhat unique in the sphere of colonial administration, or at least did so until its conquest by the Japanese. For one thing, it is not a dependency of the ‘mother country’ for it forms a component part, along with the Netherlands, Curacao and Surinam, of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As such its nationals are Dutch subjects and stand on an equal footing, legally, with the citizens of other sovereign nations. In the event of legal controversy involving a resident of the Netherlands Indies and a citizen of another nation, the principles of private international law, better known in this country as conflict of laws, come into play to determine what body of legal rules, which of the two legal systems shall be applied in the particular case. The position of the Indies with respect to Holland—or Curacao or Surinam—introduces another, somewhat different, aspect of conflict of laws. For interregional law, as it has been termed, does not involve diverse sovereignties but concerns controversies that arise between subjects of the same state, controversies that flow from the fact that Indies private law is not identical to that of the Netherlands.

Until the arrival of the Europeans, sea traffic to the Indies was merely coastal. Sailing ships went from port to port along the coasts. As the Strait of Malacca was, of old, the gateway to the Indonesian Archipelago, it is no wonder that Islam was introduced first in the settlements along the coast of this Strait.

In all probability, Moslem merchants from Hindustan, especially from Gujarat, brought Islam to the Indonesian Archipelago. They arrived in the same way and by the same means as their ancestors who brought Hindu civilization twelve centuries earlier. Islam was introduced by merchants and not by conquering Arab legions, or even by missionaries.

The history of the discoveries of Early Man in Indonesia has been marked by bold speculations and surprising successes alternating with frustrated hopes and discouraging lulls from the time when the first explorer in search of his remains set foot on Java's soil. This explorer was Eugène Dubois. He came to the island in 1889 for the outspoken purpose of finding the “missing link” and—he found it. What particular considerations induced him to seek after such a creature—at this time rather an idea than á substantiality—on this seemingly forlorn outpost of the Asiatic continent, we do not know. Dubois never told what prompted, him to look for such a phantom in Indonesia. But the fact is that he quit his position at the Department of Anatomy of the University of Amsterdam and entered the military service of the Dutch colonies as a health officer. In April 1889, he was delegated to “extend his studies to the tertiary and diluvial fauna of Java.” From that year until 1895 Dubois explored all the localities known from earlier investigations to be particularly rich in fossil remains, and assembled from them a large collection of plants and animals.

The Malay Archipelago is not only by far the largest group of islands in the world, but it is also from the standpoint of its vegetation one of the very richest regions on the globe. In this paper the term Malaysia is used to cover not only the Sunda Islands that form the center of the Netherlands East Indies—Sumatra, Java, and Borneo—but also the Malay Peninsula, in itself almost an island and biologically a part of the region, the Philippine Islands to the northeast, the Lesser Sunda Islands, Celebes, the Moluccas, and New Guinea. From northern Sumatra to eastern New Guinea the distance is approximately 3,000 miles and the land area of the region designated herein as Malaysia is somewhat in excess of 1,200,000 square miles.

The first census of the Philippines during the period of American occupation was taken on March 2,1903. About sixteen years later, the second census was taken. The need for a new census became apparent as the Philippines entered the Commonwealth period and approached final independence. The National Assembly passed a bill providing for the taking of a census which was approved and became Commonwealth Act No. 170, on November 12, 1936. President Quezon requested the services of an expert on census matters from the United States Government on August 17, 1937. The services of Mr. Ray Hurley, Acting Chief Statistician of Territorial, Insular, and Foreign Statistics of the United States Bureau, of the Census, were secured and upon his arrival in Manila he was appointed Expert on Census Matters effective as of October 9, 1937.

In the decade between the beginning of the world depression and the Japanese occupation of the islands there appeared a steadily mounting volume of literature on the Netherlands East Indies. This was a reflection of the increasing interest taken by the world, and by the United States in particular, in this large, tropical, insular dependency, but it was also an indication of the rapid social economic and political developments within the dependency. Before 1930 interest in the Netherlands Indies was not great; since 1930 world interest in it increased rapidly and by the end of the decade had become keen. The large corps of well-trained, scientifically minded Dutch officials sent forth a steadily increasing number of excellent studies on various phases of Indies life. Obviously, it is impossible to review the entire field of this literature; only the more significant contributions can be here considered.