456 APPENDIX 



conclusion, and assists in solving the difficulty resulting from 

 the distance. It is not improbable that, at some remote period 

 anterior to the introduction of the sibilant of the Western Poly- 

 nesians into the language of the Navigator's Islands, and when 

 the principal island of the latter group would be designated 

 Haicaii, voyagers proceeding thence in a south-easterly direction 

 reached New Zealand ; while others proceeding westward, by 

 way of Raiatea and Tahiti, and then northward, ultimately arrived 

 at the Sandwich Islands, and gave the name of the land they had 

 left to the home they had found. 



Not less remarkable is the extension of this language westward 

 to Madagascar. The western point of this island is not three 

 hundred miles from the shores of Africa, yet but comparatively 

 few words of African origin have been found in the language of 

 its inhabitants. On the other hand, the nearest island of the 

 Asiatic Archipelago is 3000 miles to the eastward of Madagascar, 

 and yet the resemblance between the language spoken by their 

 respective inhabitants is as close as between that of the former 

 and the Eastern Polynesians. All the Malagasy words already 

 adduced as Polynesian are also Malayan words, and the list of 

 words apparently identical in all three might be greatly increased. 

 Considerable differences, nevertheless, exist among the dialects 

 spread over so vast a surface ; but all of them contain words 

 which seem to have belonged to some of the earliest languages, 

 such as the word for father, in Malagasy, haba, and baba, papa, or pa, 

 throughout Eastern Polynesia and the Asiatic Archipelago. Some 

 of the words are said to be identical with the Sanscrit, others 

 with the Hebrew and Arabic, which, without affording grounds 

 for concluding that the language was derived from either of these, 

 would seem to warrant the inference that it is not of modern 

 origin. 



Many words are found in two of these languages, and not in 

 the third. Thus some words in Malagasy are identical with 

 those in Polynesia, but are not found in the Asiatic Archipelago ; 

 and the same occurs in the agreement between the two latter, as 

 in the word vai or wai, ayer, signifying water, which are com- 

 mon to the Malayan and Polynesian, but are unknown in Mada- 



