POLYNESIAN REUCS IN MELANESIA. 149 



The reason is by no means far to seek. 



Homekeepers have ever homely wits. Our Polynesians, who had 

 the genius to conduct such voyages as under far more favoring 

 conditions have brought immortality to Quiros and Mendafia, to 

 La Perouse and Dumont d'Urville, to Magelhaens and Roggewein, 

 to Cook, to Byron and to Bligh, to Wilkes — such were a folk far in 

 advance of the rude autochthons of the islands they encountered in 

 their passage. The black man could learn much from the brown; 

 there was little in the liberal arts that the Melanesian could com- 

 municate to the bright, aye the brilliant, Polynesian. Where they 

 came into contact could only have been in the crop settlements, 

 and in such it must have been an essential condition that the black 

 sat in subjugation to the brave brown sea-rover. What does the 

 slave in any community teach to his lord which comes into the 

 prevailing speech? One word in these two hundred is all we can 

 suspect the Polynesian to have taken from the Melanesian, and that 

 one very doubtful. Yet who of us without painful research can 

 identify for so much as the five fingers of but a single hand a word 

 apiece which the Britons have set into the language which is ours 

 by right of the conquest of Britain by the Roman, the Saxon, the 

 Norman? 



Yet one more reason is simultaneously and equally operative. 

 Crop settlement approximating semi-permanence may have taken 

 place piecemeal among ninety varying languages. Such Melanesian 

 elements as each settlement might have permitted itself to adopt 

 in the particular spot of its sojourn would be incomprehensible to all 

 other members of the migration swarm who had sojourned in con- 

 tact with each of the other eighty-nine languages. Upon their reas- 

 sembling in Nuclear Polynesia the alien elements comprehended but 

 by the company of a single vessel would be restricted in compre- 

 hensibility to that crew alone, and, thus from the beginning limited 

 in use, would tend toward disuse and Polynesia would know them 

 no longer; the superior language would heal its own wounds. 



Before leaving this central chapter in which we have discussed in 

 many lights the Polynesian content of Melanesian speech I wish to 

 sum up the major conclusions to which we have been led. 



i . In the plexus of Melanesian speech a certain element has been 

 proved to have a common origin with the Polynesian. 



2. That this varies in quality according to the ability of its 

 Melanesian possessors to respect the vital principle with which it 

 came into their possession. 



3. That this represents, wherever the data admit of deduction, 

 a phase more primitive than the Polynesian of the eastern archi- 

 pelagoes. 



