DETERMINATION OF THE PLACE OF RAPANUI. 149 



found as to awe us. Yet this is true of two-thirds of the vocabulary, 

 not only of Rapanui but of Mangareva, Tahiti, the Marquesas ; true as 

 to half of the Paumotu. 



We are not done with reirei to trample. It sounds Polynesian, it 

 looks Polynesian, it is conduplicated quite after the Polynesian method. 

 There is not one slightest particular which would give the thinnest sus- 

 picion that this is not a leaf upon the Polynesian tree strictly true to the 

 foliation type. The one and only thing that speaks against it is that 

 the strictest search has found it nowhere but in Easter Island. If I had 

 even found its carcass, perhaps decollated, as the French have dubbed 

 Saint- Jean Baptist colloquially Saint- Jean le decollete, perhaps shorn of 

 members as poultry come to the oven if I had found its miserable 

 remains in all the deformity of the gross mouthings of the folk of Anei- 

 tyum or of Tanna, far in the benighted Black Islands of the remote west 

 of the South Sea, I should have had no scruple in taking this Rapanui 

 word as the model wherewith to restore to Polynesian life the word- 

 corpse found among the cannibals, to bring it back to the citizenship of 

 the alert race of navigators. This reirei is but one word of its class in 

 Rapanui; I have had to study 2,000 just like it. And Easter Island is 

 not the only member of the province in which this holds ; a glance at the 

 unexpressed member of Table 29 will show upon how many thousand 

 similar words standing alone this all-comprehensive attention has been 

 directed in search of kin, roundly stated 16,000 derelict speech-units. 

 What I have hereinbefore written of reirei is to be written in bulk of 

 this complete tale, no thin lexicon in itself. Not one varies from the 

 Polynesian norm in any slightest degree, not one suggests in itself the 

 slightest possibility of acquisition on loan or theft from any alien source. 

 The only vocables in all Polynesian speech concerning which such sus- 

 picion could arise are the scant dozen dozen held in community with 

 Malayan speech. Concerning this element I but reiterate what I have 

 been at pains to prove elsewhere: that the borrowing was by the 

 Malayans from the Polynesians. Furthermore not a single word in 

 this unidentifiable class falls within this Malayan category. 



If the unidentified class, then, is Polynesian yet unknown to other 

 Polynesians, how may we account for its singularity of persistence ? 



As far back as we can see the Polynesian in the Pacific he is under an 

 eastward impulse; he orients himself with bravery on the sea even if 

 skill in seacraft seem lacking, and that is by no means always the case. 

 In earlier studies comprehension has come to me and has set forth the 

 two tracks of his earliest swarm through the two waterways which 

 almost continental New Guinea has severed, through the wilds of Mela- 

 nesia, and so to his home in Nuclear Polynesia; and all this can have 

 been but little short of two millenniums ago. In the work which lies 

 next my hand to do I shall be engaged in particular proof of the hostile 

 advance upon the now sedentary Proto-Samoan in his new home of a 



