5i8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



region. It is curious tliat over this Avide area from Madagascar to 

 Hawaii only one type of language is spoken by the remotest islanders, 

 belonging to all races, and having attained the most varied degrees 

 of culture. The black and woolly-haired Melanesians of the South 

 Pacific Islands, the warlike Maories of Kew Zealand, the gentle, 

 brown Polynesians, the yellow Mongoloid and Mohammedan people 

 of Java, the dark and half-negrolike Malagasy of Madagascar, all 

 speak varieties of this widely diffused language. At one time it was 

 supposed that the Malays, those active Vikings of the far East, had 

 carried their own tongue to these remote places; but then, as Mr. A. 

 H. Keane has pointed out, Malay itself is not the most primitive, 

 but the latest and most developed, member of the group. It answers 

 to French rather than to Latin; it is like modern Danish rather than 

 modern Icelandic. The truth seems to be, as Mr. Keane suggests, 

 that the language in question is a very old one, originally belonging 

 to the true Polynesians. Before their arrival the Pacific isles were 

 peopled by the low black race whom we call Melanesians. Many 

 of the archipelagoes, however, were afterward conquered and colo- 

 nized by the lighter and essentially Caucasian people, closely akin to 

 our own, whom we call Polynesians. These white Polynesians inter- 

 mixed and intermarried more or less with the black Melanesians, 

 remaining relatively pure and light-colored in a few of the archi- 

 pelagoes, while in others they acquired such an infusion of black 

 blood as made them in time dark brown or copper-colored. They 

 imposed their own speech upon the black people everywhere, exactly 

 as the English have imposed the tongue of Shakespeare and Newton 

 upon the rude American and West Indian negroes. In the remotest 

 and blackest islands, Mr. Keane points out, the oldest and crudest 

 form of the common language survives, just as the ancient Scandi- 

 navian of the Sagas survives in Iceland; in the more advanced 

 light-brown Polynesian groups, it has been improved and simplified 

 into a more modernized form, just as in Europe the ancient Scandi- 

 navian has been improved and simplified into modern Danish and 

 modern Swedish. Finally, at a still later period, the Polynesian 

 tongue was adopted by the yellowish Mongoloid Malays, who con- 

 quered the same region, and who further improved and simplified it 

 into the Malay of commerce, as the Normans did with the English of 

 King Alfred. Unfortunately, however, the languages in the lump 

 are generally called Malayan, after the latest people who adopted 

 them, instead of Polynesian, after their original speakers; which is 

 somewhat the same error as if we were to describe English as the 

 Norman tongue, or speak of Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese as be- 

 longing to the French Canadian group of languages. 



The fact is, we have to recognize that changes such as those 



