XLII.— GENERAL REVIEW 



In this preliminary excursion into the wilderness of Hawaiian lit- 

 erature we have covered but a small part of the field ; we have reached 

 no definite boundaries; followed no stream to its fountain head; 

 gained no high point of vantage, from which to survey the whole. 

 It was indeed outside the purpose of this book to make a delimita- 

 tion of the whole field of Hawaiian literature and to mark out its 

 relations to the formulated thoughts of the world. 



Certain provisional conclusions, however, are clearly indicated: 

 that this unwritten speech-literature is but a jDeninsula, a semide- 

 tached, outlying division of the Polynesian, with which it has much 

 in common, the whole running back through the same lines of an- 

 cestry to the people of Asia. There still lurk in the subliminal con- 

 sciousness of the race, as it were, vague memories of things that long 

 ago passed from sight and knowledge. Such, for instance, was the 

 Tno'o; a word that to the Hawaiian meant a nondescript reptile, which 

 his imagination vaguely pictured, sometimes as a dragonlike monster 

 belching fire like a chimera of mythology, or swimming the ocean 

 like a sea-serpent, or multiplied into a manifold pestilential swarm 

 infesting the wilderness, conceived of as gifted with superhuman 

 powers and always as the malignant foe of mankind. Now the only 

 Hawaiian representatives of the reptilian class were two species of 

 harmless lizards, So that it is not conceivable that the Hawaiian notion 

 of a mo'o was derived from objects present in his island home. The 

 ^word mo'o may have been a coinage of the Hawaiian speech- 

 center, but the thing it stood for must have been an actual existence, 

 like the python and cobra of India, or the pterodactyl of a past 

 geologic period. May we not think of it as an ancestral memory, an 

 impress, of Asiatic sights and exjDeriences ? 



In this connection, it will not, perhaps, lead us too far afield, to 

 remark that in the Hawaiian speech we find the chisel-marks of 

 Hindu and of Aryan scoring deep-graven. For instance, the Ha- 

 waiian word ixd'iy cliff or precipice, is the very word that Young- 

 husband — following, no doubt, the native speech of the region, the 

 Pamirs — applies to the mountain-walls that buttress off Tibet and 

 the central plateaus of Asia from northern India. Again the Ha- 

 Avaiian word miele^ which we have used so often in these chapters as 

 to make it seem almost like a household word, corresponds in form, 

 in sound, and in meaning to the Greek yue'Ao^: ra /ff'A.//, lyric 

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