EFATE AND VITI AND POLYNESIA. 47 



It remains to state another remarkable fact. In Three Hills Island, 

 Mae, the Polynesian settlement above mentioned is about two miles 

 distant from Sesake, at one end of the island, occupied by those who 

 may be called the aborigines. The Mae language is Polynesian, if not 

 purely, at least decidedly so ; the Sesake language is Melanesian decidedly, 

 and at any rate has nothing that makes it appear more influenced by its 

 Polynesian neighbor than if Sesake and Mae were in different and distant 

 islands. This can not be too positively stated, and the importance of the 

 fact is very great. It is an exemplification, in a very narrow field, of what 

 is also found to be the case with regard to Fiji. The Fijian group is only 

 some 200 miles west of the Friendly Islands, which are decidedly part 

 of Polynesia. There has been a considerable intercourse between the two 

 groups, and no doubt a great infusion of Tongan, Friendly Islands, blood 

 among the higher classes of Fijians. There has been also, according to 

 native legends, a considerable intercourse between Fiji and the purely 

 Polynesian Samoa. Yet the Fiji language is most decidedly Melanesian ; 

 it has no doubt something directly derived from Tonga, but it is no more 

 Polynesian than the languages of the Banks Islands, which lie far away 

 to the west, out of reach of any but the most casual and insignificant 

 intercourse with Tongans or other Polynesians. Intercourse, therefore, and 

 close neighborhood with Polynesians do not, as a matter of fact, materially 

 affect the language of Melanesians. 



Yet Efate has had its Polynesian content sufficiently long to 

 subject it to a course of modification,* and this is not the work of 

 a day or of a generation. We are, therefore, to lay aside the pos- 

 sibility that this accretion is due to westward drift in the modern 

 epoch; furthermore we are yet without information on the extent 

 to which modern Samoan is the result of the admixture of the 

 speech of the earlier and of the later migrants. 



It is equally impossible that the Polynesian accretion came to 

 Efate during the Tongafiti domination of the littoral of western 

 Samoa. We have segregated in this Polynesian content a consid- 

 erable proportion of words which, qua Polynesian, are the exclusive 

 possession of Nuclear Polynesia. It is absurd to hold it possible 

 that Tongafiti migrants should have acquired these words from the 

 Proto-Samoans with sufficient grip to carry them on a voyage against 

 the current of their race and to impress them on an alien and 

 resistant people, yet with entirely too feeble a hold to carry them 

 along the current of their further and easy migration eastward. 



The data here collected must stand as proof positive that if the 

 Polynesian content of Efate is due to a westward drift from Nuclear 

 Polynesia that acquisition must have been in the Proto-Samoan 

 period, a period which we must consider to have ended with the 

 Tongafiti swarming, the epoch of the great voyages, and that was 

 somewhere about 1,200 of our era. Against this possibility of west- 



*This is shown in examination of the data passim in this collection, and particularly 

 as regards a specific detail of such modification in my paper on Duplication by Dissim- 

 ilation, 30 American Journal of Philology, 171. 



