402 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



distributed among scholars interested in linguistic science. As a 

 result of this and other like evidences of qualification he was 

 appointed in 1837, the year of his graduation from the university, 

 to the ofl&ce of philologist and ethnographer in the United States 

 Exploring Expedition to the Pacific, under Captain (afterward 

 Admiral) Charles Wilkes. The expedition occupied the years 

 from 1838 to 1843. Mr. Hale's report on Ethnography and Phi- 

 lology, composing the seventh volume of the expedition series, 

 and filling nearly seven thousand quarto pages, appeared in 1846. 

 It is devoted to the physical and mental characteristics, the cus- 

 toms, and the languages of the natives of the Pacific islands 

 (including Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia), and of Austra- 

 lia, northwest America, Patagonia, and southern Africa. The 

 eminent ethnologist. Dr. R. G. Latham, in the preface to his work 

 on The Natural History of the Varieties of Man (1890), describes 

 the contents of Mr. Hale's volume as " the greatest mass of philo- 

 logical data ever accumulated by a single inquirer." He quoted 

 from it freely, as does also Prof. Max Miiller in his Lectures on 

 the Science of Language (second series), where he refers particu- 

 larly to the " excellent Polynesian grammar." 



The two portions of this volume which attracted most atten- 

 tion at the time of its publication, and have since most materially 

 influenced the sciences to which it related, are the section which 

 treats of the migrations of the oceanic islanders and that which 

 is devoted to the tribes of northwestern America. The first of 

 these sections, by a large accumulation of traditional and lin- 

 guistic evidence, determined the origin of the Polynesians from 

 a single island of the Malaisian Archipelago, and fixed not only 

 the probable time and place of their first appearance as emigrants 

 in the Pacific Ocean, but also the period of their settlement in 

 each of the principal groups, showing that both the original mi- 

 gration and the subsequent dispersion were events of compara- 

 tively recent occurrence, probably beginning but little before the 

 Christian era, and that the dispersion was, in fact, still going on 

 in our century. The other portion made known for the first time 

 the extraordinary number and variety of languages in northwest- 

 ern America. The " ethnographical map " prepared by the author 

 showed in what was then the Oregon Territory, comprising the 

 present States of Oregon and Washington, no less than thirty 

 languages and dialects, belonging to twelve distinct stocks, differ- 

 ing totally from one another in both vocabulary and grammar. 

 This is more than twice the number of stocks that are found in 

 the whole of Europe. These and other similar facts led to a 

 theory afterward proposed by Mr. Hale to explain them, as will 

 presently be recorded. 



After the publication of this report Mr. Hale spent a few 



