Source and Migration of the Polynesian Race. 231 



ment — instead of being- composed of Malay roots, pointing to a remote origin, — is actu- 

 ally proven by the ])resence of a number of modern Malay Ja\'anese words, — may very 

 probably apply to the western Papuans, but are void and unsustained, if applied to the 

 Polynesians proper of the East and South Pacific. So far from the Malay element 

 being a modern intrusion into the Polynesian, the latter has not only preserved manv 

 of the older forms of s]:)eech of the common Malay, but in the words which are common 

 to it and its congeners, the Battas, Dayas and Buguis, the Polynesian form is generally 

 the inirest, oldest and the least affected by phonetic corruption. 



As to there being "no proofs whatever of recent migration from anv surround- 

 ing country to Polynesia," it might be well to understand at the outset what is meant 

 by the word "recent." Is it applied in its limited sense conveying the idea of a few 

 generations or a few hundred years; or is it a]:)])lied in a comparative sense, in which 

 an event one or two thousand years ago may be called recent when compared with other 

 events of a still more remote age? If the former, there certainly are no proofs of a re- 

 cent migration from any surrounding country, inhabited by a kindred race, that could 

 account for the arrival and spread of the Polynesian in the South and East Pacific; if the 

 latter, the physical, mental and moral resemblance of the Polynesian to the pre-Malav 

 occupants of the Asiatic Archipelago,, his traditions, customs and language, prove, — 

 inferentially it is true, — but prove beyond a doubt his migration from that archipelago 

 and his kindred with its former possessors, as much so as the Celt, the Greek, the 

 Goth and the Slav can be proved to have descended from the same stock in the west, that 

 gave birth to the Hindu, Daya and Malay families in the east. 



As regards the first settlers of the Hawaiian Islands, I am led to believe that they 

 came from the Samoan group, through the Tahiti and Marquesas Islands ; in other 

 words, that the Tahitians came from Samoa, the Marc(uesans from Tahiti, and the Ha- 

 waiians from the Marquesans. The Marquesans have legends and traditions which 

 pretend to describe their wanderings in olden times, but the Hawaiians have none but 

 that their gods came from Tahiti. But where history and tradition fail, I hold that 

 the gradual and phonetic corruption of the language will in a great measure indicate 

 the halting places of those who speak it. We find then in the Tahitian that the Sa- 

 moan ng is replaced with ;; and the .v dropped or replaced with t. while the / and the t 

 are retained. On proceeding to the Marquesas we find that, with the exception of 

 some of the southern islands, ng and / have been replaced by ;; and /;, and that the k 

 sound has become as prominent as the t. Arriving at the Hawaiian group we find not 

 only s, ng, and / repudiated /;; toto and replaced by /;, n or k, and by /; or p, and that 

 k has become the predominant sound instead of t, but we find also the Tahitian causa- 

 tive hoa softened to lioo; we frequently find the k eliminated from between two vowels 

 or at the commencement of a word where it is retained in the other dialects ; we find 

 words obsolete in the Hawaiian which still pass current in the other dialects with original 

 or derivative meanings. We can thus trace the people by the phonetic corruption of 

 their language, as, I have no doubt the Samoan (not in the present, but in its original 

 form) could be traced by competent philologists to that primordial source from which 

 both the Turanian and Aryan languages issued. 



At what period in the world's history the first Polynesian settlers discovered 



