STONE AGE BASIS FOR ORIENTAL STUDY. 707 



tribes is far from being (so to speak) their own, so i)ali)ab]yhas it been 

 affected by the influence of foreigners of higher and, consequent!}^, more 

 powerful organization, thoughts, and arts. In the present state of 

 anthropology it is particularly desirable to ask the opinions of special 

 students of the great Oriental nations, from Egypt to China, as to 

 what may be called the old trade-routes by which ideas have been car- 

 ried over the barbaric WM>rld. It seems that this carrying has beeu 

 actively going on within the limits of what is technically known as the 

 Stone Age. Ever since Cook's voyages the Polynesians have stood, and 

 rightly so, as especially representative of the Stone Age. And yet the 

 traces of their communication with cultured Asia are shown by various 

 symptoms. Playing on the Jew's-harp and flying kites are the sports 

 of Asiatic nations, but they spread contimuiusly from Asia over Mela- 

 nesia and Polynesia, where they may have been before the late times 

 in which they find their w^ay into Europe. 



Especial interest attaches to the system of the universe j)revaleut 

 over tiie South Sea Islands, examined so as to show how far it differs 

 from the simple doctrine of the three worlds, the /W/oAa of earth, firma- 

 ment, hell — a system which, resting on the apparent direct evidence of 

 the senses, belongs everywhere to man in the earliest stages of knowl- 

 edge. The Polynesian systems I take as so obviously belonging to the 

 borrowed and degenerate forms of the Babylonian planet-system that 

 I think the questions open are merely in which form and by what route 

 they spread over the Pacific Islands. According to the ideas of the 

 Mangaians themselves, the earth they live on is on the top of a vast hol- 

 low cocoanut shell, the interior of which is Avaiki, the under- world, 

 into which the sun and moon descend by western openings and rise in 

 the East. Above, the ten heavens of the blessed spirits rise one above 

 the other. Below, the dismal Hades is divided into stages of gloom 

 and decay, down to mere nothingness. 



In the New Zealand cosmology, as recorded by Mr. John AVhite in 

 his Ancient History of the Maori, we have a system of the same source, 

 only varying in details. Above the fiat earth the ten heavens rise in 

 successive strata. The lowest three contain the clouds and storms, 

 and the lake, which by its overflow pours down rain and hail. Above 

 these are seven heavens inhabited by human souls, other spirits, and 

 gods, up to the highest, where Rehua dwells. The counteri)art, ten 

 hells, or rather, stages of the under-world, have the fonr uppermost 

 under Hine-niu-te-po, Great Woman Night, so that it is there that the 

 sun sets. Below are six more dismal regions, in the lowest three of 

 which is the goddess Meru, the lowest of all being called Meto — that 

 is, extinct or putrid. 



Now it is plain that the knowledge of astronomy of the Polynesians 

 neither needed nor authorized these schemes of strata above and below, 

 of which they could Jiuow nothing; but regarded as degenerate ver- 

 sions of the Babylonian-Greek astronomy, where the orbits of the sun, 



