408 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



proofs of relationship were then admitted even for languages 

 outside the pale of the Aryan and Semitic families, except those 

 which had been found applicable for establishing the relation- 

 ship between the various members of these two great families of 

 speech. My object was to show that, during an earlier phase in 

 the development of language, no such proofs ought ever to be 

 demanded, because, from the nature of the case, they could not 

 exist, while yet their absence would in no way justify us in 

 denying the possibility of a more distant relationship.'' 



It is precisely this point I wish to establish : my contention 

 being that Polynesian is " Aryan in the agglutinative stage" — 

 the more valuable because in the agglutinative stage language 

 is comparatively " transparent," and therefore etymologies are 

 knowable ; while in the later inflected stage (when the inflections 

 consist of dead and forgotten agglutinations, as in case-endings) 

 the primitive sense can only be guessed at and quarrelled over. 

 From European philologists we hear what they infer the pre- 

 inflectional Aryan language must have been, when " the 

 flections had not yet been evolved, and when the relations of 

 grammar were expressed by the close amalgamation of flection- 

 less stems in a single sentence-word ;" when " there was as yet 

 no distinction between noun and verb," and " the accusative and 

 genitive relations of after- days did not exist ; " " when as yet an 

 Aryan verb did not exist, when, in fact, the primitive Aryan 

 conception of the sentence was much the same as that of the 

 modern Dyak;" when, "apart from the imperative, the verb of 

 the undivided Aryan community possessed no other tenses and 

 moods;" when " the parent-Aryan was once itself without any 

 signs of gender." It is to the Aryan tongue in its crude but 

 more vital childhood that I wish to compare the Maori lan- 

 guage.* If there was the slightest historical probability that 

 the Maoris had received the words which compare in sound and 

 sense with European and Asiatic ones, either by conquest, by 

 commercial intercourse, or by religious teaching, then those 

 words would be easily separable : as easily as the later Sanscrit 

 can be detected in those words of Malay introduced by Brahmin 

 and Buddhist priests from India. It is not possible even to 

 pretend the probability of such late intercourse between Asia 

 and the Maori : the Maori tongue gives evidence of being a 

 primitive form of speech, not a decayed dialect of a nobler lan- 

 guage. It is only through negligence, or want of acquaintance 

 with the Polynesian tongues, that the most remarkable of these 

 "coincidences" have not been investigated before. Such men 

 as Bopp and Humboldt (both of whom saw the sure affinity) 

 failed from sheer want of material. To n 1\ upon such informa- 

 tion as the Tongan of Mariner, and the Maori of Lee and 



* See Jb'ornander, " J'olyntbian Race," vol. lii. p. 12. 



