CHAPTER IV. 

 THE FIRST POLYNESIAN HOME. 



A race always under an eastward momentum — No positive statement 

 of the place of origin possible — Bopp proposed an Aryan source — Max 

 Miiller connected it with the Turanian stock — Logan regarded the 

 Ganges Valley as the ancient home — Macdonald's Semitic theory of 

 a great and widely diffused Oceanic language set forth at large. 



Noting that the Indonesian area presents its own group of prob- 

 lems relative to the Polynesian, which have yet by no means come 

 to a satisfactory solution, we pass for the present to a summary 

 statement of the theories which have been proposed in elucidation 

 of the Polynesian migration before its entrance upon the Malayan 

 region. 



Wherever we know this race we find it under a momentum 

 directed eastward, under the impulse of some power behind, which 

 has sufficed to overcome the inertia of a race settled as autochthons. 

 But what that power may have been, what the place of autoch- 

 thonous settlement, we are without positive information. 



Beyond peradventure we recognize the momentum toward eastern 

 Polynesia from Nuclear Polynesia. In Nuclear Polynesia we recog- 

 nize the momentum, some of it from Viti. In Viti we are more 

 and more distinctly certifying ourselves of the same momentum 

 exerted along intervening steps of the Melanesian archipelagoes 

 from the Malayan exits. In Indonesia we find the same momentum 

 from Sumatra toward the east. But behind Sumatra, the Malayan 

 entrance, while we may believe in the impulse, we are at a loss to 

 find the next earlier point from which dislodgment was made. Yet, 

 as the direction sense remains constant, we need have no hesitation 

 in looking toward the west. 



The first great guess at a point of origin we owe to Bopp in his 

 classic study (1841) "Uber die Verwandschaft der malayisch-poly- 

 nesischen Sprachen mit den indisch-europaischen." His effort was 

 to establish these sea wanderers as an early, perhaps the earliest, 

 offshoot from the stock which, after long wanderings otherwhither, 

 has produced our race. 



After discussion of the same material Max Miiller evolved the 

 theory that the sea people, by then definitely accepted as Malayo- 

 Polynesian, were related to the Turanian through the Thai of Siam. 

 Later students along the same line have reached a similar conclusion 

 through the Mon-Khmer. 



