26 THE POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS. 



Percy Smith (in "Hawaiki" passim) follows the conclusions of 

 J. R. Logan in seeing the more probable seat of the early Polynesians 

 in the Ganges valley. Logan himself says, in his " Ethnology of the 

 Indo-Pacific Islands:" 



I was especially struck with the constantly accumulating evidence of 

 the derivation of the leading races of the islands (Indonesia) from Ultra- 

 india and India, and was led to the conclusion that the basin of the Ganges 

 and a large portion of Ultraindia were occupied by tribes akin to the Malayo- 

 Polynesians before the movement of the Aryan or Indo-Germanic race into 

 India. 



A survey of the character and distribution of the Gangetic, Ultraindian, 

 and Asianesian (Indonesian) peoples renders it certain that the same 

 Himalayo- Polynesian race was at one time spread over the Gangetic basin 

 and Ultraindia. As this race is allied to the Chinese and the Tibetan, it 

 is probable that it originally spread from Ultraindia into northeast India. 



We shall now proceed to the presentation of Dr. Macdonald's 

 Semitic theory, premising that in his writing Oceanic race and 

 Oceanic language are an anticipation of the proof of his deductions. 

 This he explains in the following form: 



These three groups of languages and dialects — the Malayan, the Poly- 

 nesian and the Melanesian — naming them in the order in which they have 

 successively become known, are, as Friedrich Muller has shown, members 

 or branches of the Oceanic, which is as perfectly well-defined a family of 

 languages as is the Semitic or the Indo-European. The Oceanic is, as its 

 name indicates, insular. Its habitat, which we may call Oceania, stretches 

 from Madagascar off the east coast of Africa, across the Indian Ocean to 

 the Malay Archipelago, and on through the Pacific Ocean to Easter Island. 

 On the north it has invaded from the island world and settled only on the 

 southeastern extremity of the Asiatic continent, hence called the Malay 

 Peninsula. On the south it has not reached the Australian continent, 

 though closely approaching it in New Guinea. The islanders who speak 

 Oceanic number about fifty millions, or one-thirtieth of the human race. 



To say that the Oceanic languages are a perfectly well-defined family is to 

 say that they are all sprung from one mother tongue — the Oceanic mother 

 tongue ; and to establish the Asiatic relationship of the Oceanic is to estab- 

 lish that that mother tongue was originally carried by its speakers from 

 the Asiatic continent to the island world. * * * 



It is not until we take into account the linguistic data that we get upon 

 the solid ground of certainty. And first of all it is to be observed that 

 though there was an element of negro blood in the race, due to intermixture, 

 the race itself, as its language proves, was not negro. What that race was 

 can only be determined from its language, and what that mother language 

 was is to be learned from an examination of its descendants and repre- 

 sentatives, the spoken Oceanic languages and dialects of the present day. 

 If the race came from the Arabian Peninsula, the Semitic motherland, 

 sprung from the people of the commercial empire that existed there, then 

 their language was Semitic. For the Phenicians, the people of that ancient 

 South Arabian empire and of their Abyssinian colony, and their descend- 

 ants now in Abyssinia and Arabia, all are Semitic speakers. If the race 



