262 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



he could not learn Russian, which he displayed in the ease with 

 which he could come to an understanding with the men of differ- 

 ent tribes who came on board the Rurik. His Bemerkungen und 

 Ansichten contain full vocabularies of three Polynesian dialects, 

 among them that of the Radak chain, and proofs of the Radak 

 folk-poems, in which he found a solution of his own for the prob- 

 lem of phonetic transcription, which has been so much discussed 

 since his time. He continued these studies at Luzon, where the 

 Tagalic language (of the Malaysian group) had been reduced to 

 writing, and collected a Tagalic library, which he held as one of 

 his most valuable acquisitions. When his house at New Schone- 

 berg was burned in 1822, after the lives of his family, this Tagalic 

 library was the first thing he tried to save, and, to preserve it 

 from future dangers of the kind, he presented it to the Royal 

 Library. In unison with a conviction of the unity of the human 

 race, he also in philology believed in a single origin for all lan- 

 guages, in striking contrast, as Max Muller has remarked to me 

 in a letter, with his habit of emphasizing the specific in natural 

 history. 



A linguistic episode which Chamisso relates is, perhaps, even 

 now of some current interest. The curious custom was in vogue 

 in Tahiti of (on the accession of a new ruler and similar cases) 

 extirpating words from the common (not the old liturgical) speech 

 and replacing them with new ones. About the year 1800, Tamei- 

 ameia, the King of the Sandwich Islands, likewise, on the birth of 

 a son, invented an entirely new language, and began to introduce 

 it. The newly formed words were not related to any roots in 

 the current language, and even the particles were changed. It is 

 said that some of the powerful chiefs, displeased with the move- 

 ment, poisoned the child who was the occasion of it, and what 

 had been undertaken on his birth was given up on his death. 

 The old language was restored and the new one forgotten, so that 

 Chamisso only found a few fragments of it. He learned just 

 enough of the Hawaiian language to enable him to speak intelli- 

 gibly with the natives concerning the most necessary matters, 

 but made no attempt to commit it to writing. When he came to 

 revise his Travels for a new edition, just before he was elected to 

 the Academy, the Hawaiian language had become one of litera- 

 ture, and the murder of a prince was not needed to deliver it from 

 an artificial rival. Publications enough had issued from the 

 Hawaiian press to make a fundamental study of the language 

 practicable. Wilhelm von Humboldt had begun, in the course of 

 his great work on the Kawi language of Java, to cast light upon 

 the Polynesian languages, when death called him away on the 

 same day that Chamisso's election came up. The latter now 

 thought he recognized a calling derived from his voyage and his 



