1898-99. ] DECIPHERING HIEROGLYPHIC INSCRIPTIONS OF CENTRAL AMERICA, 
213 
occasion of festivals, was not characteristic of these peoples.° The Maya 
name of the pulque liquor which takes the place of the Polynesian cava 
is cz. In the number of their feasts, in their dances, their caste system, 
the absolute rule of their kings, their excessive imposts, their human 
sacrifices, and idolatrous scarifications, as well as in a host of other 
things, the Polynesians and the Maya-Quiches were virtually one people. 
The writer has not discovered the ¢aboo of Polynesia in Yucatan and 
Guatemala, but as the ceremonies of the two populations were the same 
it is not likely that this was wanting in Central America. 
A reference to the comparative vocabulary will show that, while the 
Tagala of the Philippines exhibits numerous correspondences with the 
Maya, the fuller dictionary of the Tonga displays a closer resemblance. 
The Tongan ow, a king, answers to the Maya ahau ; its cow catanga, 
the suite of a chief, to the obscure Maya atun, a body of troops ; and 
its fatongia, a tax, impost, work to be done to discharge a tax (statute 
labour), to the equally obscure Maya fatan, tribute. Java supplies the 
best equivalents of the Maya wzzzc, man, and atan, wife, in its words 
wong and wadhon. The Maya numerals are very unlike those of the 
Malay-Polynesians at the present day, and have most of their affinities 
with those of the Pelew and Caroline Islands. This would suggest a 
migration route north of the equator. The Maya name has undoubted 
connections with that of Maui,the ancestral god of many Polynesian 
peoples, which, geographically, is represented by the native names of 
important islands, in New Zealand in the south, and in the Sandwich or 
Hawaiian group in the north. 
One important result of word comparison is that of the Maya zrzm, 
maize, with the Malay jzagung or yagung. The Huastec form of the 
word is agam. The discovery of maize forms a striking episode in the 
native legendary histories of the Quiches and the Aztecs. The Popol- 
Vuh of the former represents Gucumatz, or The Plumed Serpent, as 
going in search of it; and the Mexican Codex Chimalpopoca attributes 
its discovery to Quetzalcoatl, whose name is supposed to have the same 
signification. One of my former correspondents, the late Dr. Short, in 
his North Americans of Antiquity, indicates that the Mexican account 
was probably borrowed from the Quiche.’ Referring to the introduction 
into Mexico of the cultivation of maize and cotton, Dr. Pickering says: 
‘Now, the art of cultivation could not have been derived from Oregon, 
where the idea was aboriginally absent, a state of things connected 
apparently with the high northern source of the Mongolian population 
of America, the climate precluding agriculture in the parent countries. 
