PHILOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIPS. 105 



— are found unaltered from the ]\Ialagasy form of them in one 

 or other of the Malayo-Polynesian languages. 



It must he said here that Mr. Wake does not deny some 

 Malayan affinities in the Malagasy (indeed he devotes a long 

 paragraph of his paper to an examination of the points of 

 agreement between the Hovas and the Siamese, saying that 

 " it is among the more civilised people of the Malayan Archi- 

 pelago that we must seek for special Hova affinities " ), but he 

 thinks the African relationships as strong ; so much so that 

 he is inclined to suppose that many of the African races went 

 from Madagascar to the continent, and that Madagascar, or 

 some spot farther eastward, and now submerged, was the seat 

 of man's primitive civilisation. 



If, however, we take such a work as Mr. Alfred Wallace's 

 Malay Arcliipdago, and examine the vocabularies given at 

 the end of the second volume, we shall find that in the list 

 of " Nine Words in Fifty-nine Languages " of that region, 

 the Malagasy words are discovered in every one of the nine 

 columns ; and not only so, but in most of these nine 

 examples words exactly like, or most closely identical with, 

 the Malagasy are found in a great number of the fifty-nine 

 languages. Thus, the Malagasy afo (fire) is found in twenty 

 languages ; Ula (tongue) also in twenty ; fotsy (white), in 

 thirty ; and so on. Again, in the list of " One Hundred and 

 Seventeen Words in Thirty-three Languages of the Malay 

 Archipelago," the Malagasy words are found in more than 

 eighty, or five-sevenths of the whole number ; and also, as in 

 the other list, often in not one only, but in many of these 

 thirty-three languages. This remark applies to the Hova form 

 of Malagasy, but it is highly probable that were the coast 

 dialects more fully known many other similarities would be 

 discovered. And it is also a fact that in the Polynesian 

 lansuan;es, and in those of New Guinea, there are also 

 numerous correspondences with Malagasy ; so that the argu- 

 ment for the Malayo-Polynesian affinities with the ]\Iada- 

 gascar language is very strong indeed, and there is nothing 

 yet produced on the African side which can be at all com- 

 pared with it. 



It will, however, be desirable to state in as brief a form 



