6 INTRODUCTION. 



in Hawaii and New Zealand, and the intermediate Cook and Austral 

 Groups together with scattered islands in that region of sea, leaving 

 their establishment as a province to the care of the particular students 

 of the Tongafiti migration with which they seem most associable. In 

 this province of Southeast Polynesia we shall devote our attention to 

 unraveling from the language records the story of the peopling of the 

 several lands. 



At this point it is proper to comment upon the source of the lin- 

 guistic material and to a certain extent upon the quality of the record. 

 One condition runs through all the vocabularies with which we are to 

 deal : they have been collected by the French priests, who have devoted 

 lives of self-abnegation to the cure of these remote and seldom re- 

 sponsive souls. This we shall find applies to the two vocabularies 

 which we possess in an English rendering. The recorders, therefore, 

 represent a singularly even type. It will surely not give offense if we 

 characterize them as devoid of professional training for such work, 

 for they will heartily acknowledge that they have been trained to 

 higher things than the things of this world. Each such dictionary 

 has been compiled as a necessary adjunct of mission work ; it has been 

 prepared by each priest to enable him to carry the gospel to the 

 savages of his parish, to provide the ready means for his assistants 

 or successors to carry on the work. The recorders have lacked time, 

 special preparation, even interest in considering any questions of 

 comparative philology and ethnology which might arise in connection 

 with the speech record. They have gone very directly to a very 

 simple end, to prepare such a word-list as might enable them to present 

 their message of civilization. There is clear internal evidence that 

 even the most finished of these dictionaries has been prepared upon a 

 method which must of necessity be misleading. The author, at least 

 the original compiler of the first word-lists which have become the 

 base of later dictionaries, has begun in the inverted order. He has 

 started from his original French and has sought to ascertain the Poly- 

 nesian equivalent. The result is that the dictionaries of Southeast 

 Polynesia are in no wise comparable with the wealth found in the 

 dictionaries of Nuclear Polynesia, that of George Pratt for Samoa 

 and of Shirley Waldemar Baker for Tonga. These latter had first 

 steeped themselves in the languages of their respective fields of use- 

 fulness. When the time came for them to write their dictionaries they 

 began with the indigenous word and then sought out its English 

 equivalent. In the French group we find general evidence, in Pere 

 Roussel's work we find particular evidence, that each compiler followed 

 a certain list of French words and directed his attention more or less 

 seriatim to finding equivalents all the way down the list. It has pro- 

 duced a monotony of uniformity; at the same time it has left the 

 product uniformly comparable. 



