Chap. .xix.J INTER-UREEDING ON OCEANIC ISLANDS. 443 



the size of the mouth, which encroaches upon and renders 

 insignificant the remainder of the head. Mr. Franks is of 

 opinion that, as far as regards the special development of art, 

 and forms of implements of use amongst the New Zealanders, 

 that people are nearly allied to the Hawaiians, certainly more 

 nearly so than to the Samoans, from colonists of which race 

 Hall supposed that the Maoris were sprung. The stone 

 adzes of the New Zealanders are of the same form as those of 

 the Hawaiians, and both differ, for example, from those of 

 Tahiti. 



The affinities of the New Zealand language appear to show 

 that the ancestors of the Maoris reached New Zealand from 

 Rarotonga, and it appears that Hawaiki, the distant land of 

 which their tradition spoke, is the religious name of the mythi- 

 cal land of origin of the whole Polynesian race, not to be iden- 

 tified with any particular island.* 



The well-known posts with images carved on their tops, set 

 up in the fences around New Zealand houses, may well be 

 compared with the somewhat similar posts set up round the 

 temples in the Hawaiian group. In many cases, rough blocks 

 of wood on the tops of the New Zealand posts, evidently 

 represent the carved figures with which the other posts asso- 

 ciated with them are surmounted, in the same way as the 

 crescent-shaped notches in the Hawaiian posts represent heads 

 of gods. In New Zealand, however, images of the actual 

 gods were not made or worshipped ; the images represented 

 ancestors or tutelary deities only. 



There were, according to the Government census of 

 December, 1872, 438 lepers at the leper establishment in the 

 Island of Molokai. There can be no doubt that the races 

 inhabiting all the isolated Polynesian Islands must have sprung 

 originally from a very small stock, which arrived there probably 

 haphazard in canoes, or possibly sometimes in larger vessels. 

 Hence the races must have been produced by close inter- 

 breeding, and only very rarely, if at all, can any extraneous 

 blood have been interfused by the arrival of further waifs. 



May not this circumstance be connected in some degree 

 with the extreme liability of the Sandwich Islanders to the 

 attacks of leprosy ? 



A similar close inter-breeding must have occurred in the case 

 of the animals and plants inhabiting isolated islands. No 

 doubt many islands may have been colonized by plants which 

 have sprung from only a single seed transported by birds, 

 or otherwise. Similarly, no doubt, all the birds of a species 



* "Die Inseln des Stillcn Oceans." C. E. Meinickc. Leipzig, Paul 



Frohberg, ibys. I Th., s. 312. 



