388 REMARKS AND OPINIONS. 



The natives of Radack, like the English, witli 

 a pronunciation difficult to be acquired, have not 

 the faculty of easily understanding foreigners, nor 

 of making themselves understood by them. We 

 believe these dialects to be less simple in their 

 construction than the dialect of Eastern Polynesia. 

 We do not recognize, in different sentences, the 

 roots which we expect to find in them, and the 

 difficulty of mutual understanding seems^ to indi- 

 cate this circumstance. The dialect of the Pelew 

 islands seems to us to be the most different, and 

 that of Radack to approach the nearest to the 

 common language of the eastern South Sea 

 islanders ; and it was there we first found the 

 arithmetical system, founded on the scale of twenty, 

 as in New Zealand and the Sandwich islands, while 

 the more western Carolinians, the Malays, and 

 the Tagalese, use the pure decimal scale, which 

 is also customary in Tonga. 



Even within the limits assigned to these pro- 

 vinces, namely, in the south-west, nearest to the 

 habitations of the Papuas, and to the Moluccas, 

 we find several islands, the inhabitants of which 

 were understood by natives of the Sandwich 

 islands, and whose boats resembled those- of 

 Owhyee : we speak of Mavil's islands* ; a cir- 

 cumstance which appears to us to deserve at- 

 tention. 



* Vide Anowsmith's Chart of the Pacific Ocean, 1798, and 

 Meare's Voy. p. 293. 



