118 DANIEL WILSON ON 
But this idea of a migration through the islands of the Pacific receives curious confir- 
mation from another source. In an ingenious paper on “the Origin of Primitive Money,” ’ 
originally read at the meeting of the British Association at Montreal in 1884, Mr. Horatio 
Hale shows that there is good reason for believing that the most ancient currency 
in China, consisted of disks and slips of tortoise shell. The fact is stated in the great 
Chinese encyclopædia of the Emperor Kang-he, who reigned in the early years of the 
eighteenth century; and the Chinese annalists assert that metal coins have been in use 
from the time of Fuh-he, about B.C. 2950. Without attempting to determine the specific 
accuracy of Chinese chronology, it is sufficient to note here that the most ancient form of 
Chinese copper cash is the disk, perforated with a square hole, so as to admit of the coins 
being strung together. This, which corresponds with the large perforated shell-disks, or 
native currency of the Indians of California, and with many specimens recovered from 
ancient mounds, Mr. Hale regards as the later imitation in metal of the original Chinese 
shell money. A similar shell-currency, as he shows, is in use among many islanders of the 
Pacific ; and he traces it from the Loo-Choo islands, across the vast archipelago, through 
many island groups, to California; and then overland, with the aid of numerous disclosures 
from ancient mounds, to the Atlantic coast, where the Indians of Long Island were long 
noted for its manufacture in the later form of wampum. “The natives of Micronesia,” 
says Mr. Hale, who, it will be remembered, records the results of personal observation, 
“in character, usages, and language, resemble to a certain extent the nations of the 
southern and eastern Pacific groups, which are included in the designation of Polynesia, 
but with some striking differences, which careful observers have ascribed, with great 
probability, to influences from north-eastern Asia. They are noted for their skill in 
navigation. They have well-rigged vessels, exceeding sixty feet in length. They sail by 
the stars, and are accustomed to take long voyages.” To such voyagers, the Pacific presents 
no more formidable impediments to oceanic enterprise than did the Atlantic to the North- 
men of the tenth century. 
Throughout the same archipelago, modern exploration is rendering us familiar with 
examples of remarkable stone structures and colossal sculptured figures, such as those 
from Easter Island now in the British Museum. Rude as they undoubtedly are, they are 
highly suggestive of an affinity to the megalithic sculptures and cyclopean masonry of 
Peru. Monuments of this class were noted long ago by Captain Beechy, on some of the 
islands nearest the coasts of Chili and Peru. Since then the megalithic area has been 
extended by their discovery in other island groups lying towards the continent of Asia. 
Another subsidiary class of evidence of a different kind, long since noted by me, gives 
additional confirmation to this recovered trail of ancient migration through the islands of the 
Pacific to the American continent. The practice to which the Flathead Indians of Oregon 
and British Columbia owe their name, the compressed skulls from Peruvian cemeteries 
and the widely-diffused evidence of the prevalence of artificial malformation among many 
native American tribes, combine to indicate it as one of the most characteristic American 
customs. Yet the evidence is abundant which shows not only that it was a practice 
among rude Asiatic Mongol tribes of primitive centuries ; but that it was still in use 
among the Huns and Avars, who contended with the Barbarians from the Baltic for the 

1 Popular Science Monthly, xxviii. 296. 
