THE SAWAIORI BEGINNING RESTS UNKNOWN. 179 



It is impossible that each can be right in his deduction. To those 

 who have followed thus far this review of the data it will seem far 

 from impossible that each is in equal error. 



In summation we are to consider what facts are established in our 

 knowledge of the earlier history of the Polynesians. 



A. In Polynesia. 



We have the excellent authority of concurrence of tradition, and 

 to those who can bring themselves into harmony with the Poly- 

 nesian manner of thought their tradition has the validity of history. 

 We shall find this history most succinctly set forth in the volume of 

 "Hawaiki" to which reference has been made earlier in this work, 

 and we shall find its several incidents as derived from diverse sources 

 most satisfactorily synchronized and intelligently discussed in the 

 same work. We have in the foregoing pages and in the data upon 

 which they are based a very considerable mass of language history. 

 Fortunately we are not under the necessity of estimating the com- 

 parative moment of each of these sources of information. That 

 would be a problem as interesting as intricate in case of conflict. 

 In our studies they run in confirmation and reciprocal corroboration. 

 For every inference to which the philological line may lead us we 

 find support in this fragment or that of some tradition; for every 

 statement set down in the tradition we find such corroboration in 

 the philological analysis that the legend handed down in memory 

 is proved to have the value of history. 



Confirmed and upheld thus doubly at every point we are assured 

 of the following facts in Polynesia : 



i. Nuclear Polynesia (Samoa the nucleus and Niue, Tonga, Viti, 

 describing the perimeter) was under settlement by Polynesians from 

 a date so remote that they had lost all direct memory of an anterior 

 movement thither. They held themselves autochthons, and in the 

 greater groups had creation myths in which land first emerged from 

 the tireless sea, their own the first of lands and they upon it the 

 first of men. These we style the Proto-Samoans. The indirect tra- 

 dition of a former home told no rearward tale to them. It is only 

 by inference and through digestion of many such traditions that we 

 are able to read into the consistent belief in the westward home of 

 the spirit a dim record of an earlier abiding-place. The dead go 

 home, home to a home that the living have long ceased to remem- 

 ber ; blessed are the dead in their direction sense. 



2. Upon this Proto-Samoan settlement came a later wave of 

 migration of the same race. This second migration held its footing 

 upon Nuclear Polynesia through a period whose duration we are 

 quite without the data to estimate. In general the later migrants 

 behaved so harshly to the original inhabitants, albeit of their own 



