Origin of the Hawaiian Nation. 47 



gether reject, as being too much for their powers of utterance. Thus 

 they change fashions into patena or pakena ; missionary into miti' 

 nary or mikinary ; and consul into tonatele or konakele. Finally, 

 the Marquesan or Tahitian dialects, though they partake, in an emi- 

 nent degree, of the softness of the Hawaiian, have yet retained at 

 least one consonant, namely/, which it has discarded. The Fatuivay 

 one of the Marquesan Isles and Paofai, a chief of Tahiti, would, in 

 the mouth of an Hawaiian, respectively become Patuiwa and Pao- 

 pai ; while there can be no mistake as to the original orthography, 

 inasmuch as the /is distinguished in the one word from Vj and in 

 the other from p. Might not a similar application be made of the 

 table which preceded this paragraph, with respect to these three dia- 

 lects ? In the first four of its six words, the v of the Tahitians and 

 Marquosans becomes the w of the Hawaiians ; — the former being, of 

 course, a consonant ; but the latter, however it may be classed by 

 grammarians, being really oo, sounded as quickly as possible. If 

 there be any truth in these desultory and incomplete suggestions, 

 then must this Archipelago have been peopled after the Marquesas 

 and the Society Islands, and they again after the more westerly 

 group. 



This result, which, so far as the Sandwich Islands is concerned, 

 agrees with the traditionary lore of the Archipelago, is consistent 

 with nearly all the arguments which can be brought to bear on the 

 subject. Looking on the map at the tolerably continuous chain of 

 islands and groups of islands, from Sumatra to the Marquesas, and 

 at the comparatively open ocean between this its last link and the 

 American continent, a plain man would instinctively infer, at least 

 in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that Polynesia, as cer- 

 tainly as Australasia itself, must have been .peopled, not from the 

 new world, but from the old ; and he would find his inference mate- 

 rially confirmed by the fact, that, on any and every hypothesis, the 

 isles of the Pacific could have been colonized from the westward 

 long before the eastern shores of that ocean contained a single family 

 of human beings ; while, on further investigation, he would confess- 

 edly discover vastly more numerous traces of Asia than of America, 

 in the ethnographic characteristics of the Polynesian Isles. 



The single, absolutely the only, answer to all this, is the physical 

 fact, that the trade-wind blows from the oast along the whole breadth 

 of the route which has been chalked out for the primeval colonists 

 of the islets of this greatest of all seas. Now, m the face of so much 

 direct proof of an Asiatic origin, the evidence in question of an Ame- 

 rican origin amounts to nothing, unless the difficulty of advancing 

 from west to east in spite of the trade-wind actually amounts to an 

 impossibility. 



But, so far from amounting to an impossibility, the difficulty it- 

 self, strictly so called, can hardly be said to have existed. As the 

 trades, even at their steadiest, take to themselves a few points of 



