Malayan and Polynesian Languages and liaces. 195 



the nearest portion of which is 35° from the equator, and, 

 consequently, within the region of variable winds and tem- 

 pests. 



The same difficulty, however, it should be observed, exists 

 in attempting to account for the fact of the New Zealand 

 islands being peopled, throughout, by the Polynesian race, 

 speaking the Polynesian language. By some means or other, 

 practicable to a rude people, an intercourse, we may be quite 

 sure, took place between these islands and the intertropical 

 ones inhabited by the same race of men, speaking the same 

 language — since men are no more born with language than 

 with mathematics — are born, in a word, only with a capacity 

 to acquire both, equally branches of acquired knowledge. 

 For New Zealand, then, notwithstanding the difficulties of 

 the voyage, whether from the Malay Archipelago, or between 

 it and the intertropical islands of the Pacific, tempest-driven 

 praus, or fleets of praus, are our only resource for a rational 

 explanation. 



A brief examination of the cultivated plants and domesti- 

 cated animals of the Polynesian Islands, on their first discovei'y 

 by Europeans, may, perhaps, be thought to throw some light 

 on the mode in which their languages received an infusion 

 of Malayan. 



The following were the plants, — the cocoa-nut, the bread- 

 fruit, the yam, the batata, the taro, the sugar-cane, the 

 orange, the banana, the bamboo, and the paper-mulberry. 

 Every one of these is a native of the Indian Archipelago; 

 but if the Malayan nations brought them, they did not bring 

 the names, with two trifling or partial exceptions. The 

 cocoa-nut is known by a Malayan name in the Polynesian 

 dialect of the Sandwich Islands, but not in the Mai'quesas. 

 It has the same Malayan name also in the Negro languages 

 of New Caledonia and Taiina, but not in the Malicolo. In the 

 New Caledonia alone, I find the Malayan name for a yam 

 written uji, for ubi. In the Tanna and Malicolo, these are 

 different ones. 



liice, with all the numerous pulses, and esculent vege- 

 tables known in the Indian Archipelago, were not found in 

 the islands of the Pacific ; and, with the exception of the 



