400 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



deavours to show that a migration did take place ; 

 secondly, that the Polynesians are in their physical, 

 mental, and moral characteristics, a true Malayan 

 race. 



1. Migrations. — We find in M. Qnatrefages' volume a 

 very careful summary of all the native accounts of their 

 migrations, and also of the involuntary migrations that 

 have recently occurred. These, no doubt, prove that the 

 Sandwich Islands and New Zealand have been peopled 

 by emigrants from the Marquesas and Tahiti, and the 

 fact of this emigration is confirmed by the independent 

 evidence of language. It is proved, therefore, that the 

 Polynesians have passed over immense spaces of ocean, 

 in directions not especially favoured by winds or currents, 

 and thus the difficulty of any migration from its mere 

 distance is quite overcome. It is further shown that all 

 the traditions point to the Samoan group and the Fiji 

 Islands as the central points to which almost all Poly- 

 nesians trace their origin. It is to be observed here that 

 these are the largest of all the islands in the central Pacific 

 inhabited by the Polynesian race, and it is these, therefore, 

 that we should naturally expect to have sent out colonies 

 to the smaller islands. So far we have the strongest 

 corroboration of there having actually been a migration, 

 in the fact of the community of language, and all the 

 legends of these migrations speak of them as having been 

 made by simple men, the natural ancestors of the existing 

 Polynesians. But in the legend which refers the origin 

 of the Samoans themselves to a migration from a large 

 country " further west," we get into pure legend, — for 

 the mythic Bouloton, whence the first inhabitants are 

 said to have come from, is a spiritual and not a real 

 country, and these inhabitants are believed to have been 

 not men, but inferior gods. But the direct evidence, so 

 far as it goes, of the earliest migration having been from 

 the west, is by no means so clear as M. Quatrefages would 

 have us believe ; for one of the best authorities on the 

 subject, Mr. W. P. Pritchard, who has spent his whole life 

 in the Pacific, and from his long residence in the Feejee 

 And Samoan Islands as British Consul, and his intimate 



