THE SAWAIORI BEGINNING RESTS UNKNOWN. 183 



between Polynesia and Indonesia without having left a record of 

 their passage through Melanesia. 



The presence of these double and of these more common triple 

 affinities has served as the basis for the erection of the Malayo-Pcly- 

 nesian speech family. That family was created by great scholars 

 and has been supported by their followers no less great. One hesi- 

 tates to deviate from the conclusions upon which there is substantial 

 agreement of Humboldt, Bopp, Friedrich Muller, Max Muller, Whit- 

 ney, and the generality of students of systematic philology. 



Yet now I have the less hesitation. In preceding works, where 

 topically, however, I was dealing only with the Polynesian, I found 

 myself forced to set aside the earlier estimate of the character of the 

 languages of the Pacific and to establish them as of the isolating 

 class,* a position in which I am more and more confirmed as my 

 studies go more deeply into the matter. Therefore I am ready to 

 pronounce the decree of divorce upon Malay and Polynesian. Lan- 

 guages of different classes, of uncoordinate syntax, of irreconcilable 

 vocabularies — too long have they been unequally yoked. In the 

 present collection of data there is not a single item which is not most 

 readily explicable as loan material, there is not one in which there 

 can be mustered any proof that its source was Indonesian. 



D. The Old Home. 



The material with which we have so long been engaged, and it is 

 hoped not without profit and interest, leads us from Polynesia back- 

 ward along Melanesia and to many a remote shore of the Malay 

 Archipelago. Did the Polynesians have no earlier history? Was 

 it in these warm islands that they became man and slowly acquired 

 that control over certain muscles susceptible of high specialization 

 in function which gave them speech? 



A most interesting speculation. It has engaged the zeal of all such 

 as have felt the attraction of this least contaminated of the races 

 of men. Every shred of tradition has sedulously been studied for 

 such record as it might reveal. The interpreters of these tradition- 

 histories have been led back to Indonesia as distinctly as this mass 

 of linguistic material has led us who have been studying it together. 

 All paths lead to Indonesia as an early, a very early, home of the 

 Sawaiori. 



But backward ? 



Dr. Macdonald has toiled for a lifetime to prove a Semitic origin, 

 a yet eastern heme in the region to which the Bab el Mandeb is 

 indeed a gateway. I can not find that his theory stands the test 

 of examination. 



"27 American Journal of Philology, 380. 



