Source and Migration of tlic Polynesian Race. 227 



hood should assert and assume the preeminence of rank over that of intelHgence, and I 

 hence conclude that the Polynesian division was older than the Sanskrit. 



How long the Polynesian family remained in the Asiatic Archipelago ere it 

 debouched in the Pacific, there is no means of forming even a conjecture. We only 

 know that it must have left before its remaining congeners and cousins, in the course 

 of the phonetic corruption of a once common tongue, commenced to add consonants to 

 the endings of their words, or to eliminate vowel sounds, thus bringing two consonants 

 together. Its reminiscences of that period are not man\', with the exception of the identi- 

 fication of names of places. Its practice of tatooing (tatau) was either brought with it 

 from India, or was ado])ted there. "Milu," the Polynesian (Haw.) Pluto, god of the 

 infernal regions, below the sea, where departed spirits went, according to some traditions, 

 calls to mind Mount Miru (Gounoung se Miru), the sacred mountain in Java and first 

 settlement of the Hindus in that island under Tritestra or Aji-Saka, about A. D. 76, 

 although the name of the mountain may be as properly found in the Hawaiian adjective 

 Milii, grand, solemn. The anthropophagism of some of the Polynesian tribes did prob- 

 ably receive its earliest development and confirmation during their sejour in the Malay 

 Archipelago, and it is yet practiced by those of their kin who remained, such as the 

 Battas, the Idaans and others. When they left India this horrible practice had prob- 

 ably not gone farther than the drinking the blood of a slain enemy, a j^ractice common 

 with the Rajpoots in northwestern India and some other of the older, if not aboriginal, 

 tribes of that country. 



I believe however that the Polynesian family did not leave the Asiatic Archi- 

 pelago before Brahmanism had been introduced there. And although the Polynesians 

 never adopted either Brahmanism or Buddhism as a creed, yet they carried with them 

 and retained among their traditionary lore not a few of the ideas to which Brahmanism 

 gave birth and circulation. The earth being created from an egg, referred to by Ellis 

 as a Hawaiian tradition, is a Brahmin dogma. The different versions of the flood, 

 current among the Polynesian tribes, north and south, had their ])roI)able origin in the 

 Brahmin legend of Satyuorata, the seventh Manu. who alone with his family escaped 

 the deluge that destroyed the rest of mankind. 



The story of the fountain of youth and life — the "wai-ola-loa a Kane" — if not 

 of Brahmin origin, was widely upheld by them, and was well known — mutatis 

 mutandis — to the Polvnesians. The arrangement of the calendar into twelve months 

 of thirty days, with an intercalary month points strongly to a Brahmin-Malay original. 

 The use of the betel or areca nut, tliough practised by many of the Papuan tribes and 

 probably introduced among them by the neighboring Malays, or vice versa, is unknown 

 to the Polynesian family. How old that custom may be among the Malays I have no 

 means of ascertaining; but I infer that the Polynesians left for the Pacific before it 

 was ado])ted. The resemblance and conformity of usages, customs and modes of thought, 

 between the Polynesians and the Dayas, Battas, Buguis and other tribes still living in 

 the Malay Archipelago, and which I look upon as remnants of the Polynesian family, 

 are too many and too striking not to indicate a close relationship, a common origin, and 

 a lengthened period of residence in the same place, to give time for their development 

 and spread. 



