dau.. I SUMMARY. 147 



been readied or distributed in certain families wherever their branches 

 were to be found. This we do not find. 



The only other alternative which occurs to me is that these features 

 have been impressed upon the American aboriginal world from with- 

 out. If so, from whence ? 



Northern Asia gives us no help whatever. The characteristics re- 

 ferred to are all foreign to that region. 



If nations from the eastern shores of the Atlantic were responsible, 

 we should expect the Atlantic shores of America to show the results of 

 the influence most clearly. This is not the case, but the very reverse 

 of the case. 



We are then obliged to turn toward the region of the Pacific. 



The great congeries of islands known to geographers as Polynesia and 

 Melanesia, stretch toward South America in latitude 25° south, as in no 

 other direction. Here we have a stream of islands from Papua to the 

 Paumotus, dwindling at last to single islets with wide gaps between, 

 Elizabeth, Ducie, Easter Island, Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, St. Am- 

 brose, from which comparatively it is but a step swept by the northerly 

 current to the Peruvian coast. We observe also that these islands lie 

 south from the westerly south equatorial current, in the slack water be- 

 tween it and an easterly current and in a region of winds blowing to- 

 ward the east. 



Here, then, is a possible way. 



I have stated how the peculiar and remarkable identity of certain 

 carvings associated with religious rites turned my attention to the Me- 

 lauesian Islands. 



The customs, etc., I have called attention to, are, particularly, the use 

 of masks and carvings to a more than ordinary degree, labretifery, hu- 

 man head preserving; identity of myths. 



In Melanesia we have not yet found more than traces of labretifery, 

 but if the speculations of ethnologists, that these and the African race 

 had a common origin, have a reasonable foundation, we have in Africa, 

 as I have shown in America, a wonderful development of this practice, 

 which in tbat case might be due to a similar impulse from a parental 

 locality. 



In Melanesia, and to a less extent in Polynesia proper, we find the art 

 of carving wonderfully developed, and (including New Zealand as a 

 southern offshoot) thence on the suggested way we have the prehis- 

 toric carvings and inscribed tablets of Easter Island, the sculptures and 

 picture-writing of Peru, Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona, and the 

 northwest coast, forming a nearly continuous series with local develop- 

 ments wholly or mostly different in detail and showiug local style, but 

 with a general agreement in fundamental character not elsewhere par- 

 alleled. 



In his work on the geology of the provinces of Canterbury and West- 

 land, Haast expresses (1. c, pp. 407-431) the opinion that New Zealand 



