THE POLYNESIANS AND THEIR PLANT-NAMES. 137 



the equivalent of the Malay name is applied only to Amor- 

 phophallus. Then, again, I will subsequently show that the 

 Tacca plant, as the source of the Polynesian arrowroot, has 

 carried the Malayan name of the Sago Palm into the most 

 distant islands of the Pacific. Thus Tacca pinnatifida is 

 linked on either side by means of its vernacular names with 

 such dissimilar plants as Amotphophallus campanulatus and 

 the Sago Palm : in the one case, the resemblance is concerned 

 with the foliage and habit and the edible character of the 

 tuber ; in the other, with the production of a farina. 



It will thus be seen that in following up the names of a 

 particular plant we often stumble upon a set of names that 

 includes plants of very different characters. It may be 

 some archaic word for tubers or edible roots applied here to 

 the taro, there to a fern-root, as in New Zealand, and again, 

 in a third place, to the yam, or the sweet-potato, a subject to 

 which 1 will again refer. In order, indeed, to find the affinity 

 of a plant-name we have not infrequently to cast our net 

 rather widely. For instance, in the case of Fritchardia 

 pacifica, the Polynesian Fan Palm, as the genus does not 

 occur in the Indian Archipelago, we look for the equivalent 

 of the Polynesian name of " Piu " in connection with other 

 fan palms in that region, and we find it in "Wiru," the 

 Sundanese generic term for Licuala. Then, again, the names 

 of Pandanus are sometimes traced solely through the mat- 

 words. For a long time I was puzzled by a Malagasy name 

 for these trees, viz., Vtikoana. At length I came upon " Bang- 

 koan " as a term for large mats in the Philippine Islands, and 

 subsequently the word came under my notice as a Pandanus 

 name in other languages of the Archipelago. We have 

 only to turn over a few pages of Tregear's Comparative 

 Dictionary of the Maori language to perceive how wide 

 may be the range of the affinities of a Polynesian plant- 

 name. 



That the vernacular names of this region can afford a 

 trustworthy basis for such a discussion as this there can be 

 no doubt ; but this can only be the case by compliance with 

 the laws of hnguistic comparison. De Candolle, in his work 

 on the Origin of Cultivated Plants, starts with the assumption 

 that a naturalist possessed of an ordinary general education 

 can recognise the connection or the fundamental difference 

 between plant-names in different languages. " It is not 

 necessary," he adds, " to be initiated into the mysteries of 

 suffixes or affixes, of dentals and labials." This depreciation 



