WANDERING ALBATKOSS ON THE NEST. 



CHAPTER IV 



Some Polynesian and Hawaiian Birds 



The islands lying to the eastward of the Solomon group, which include those of 

 the typical Polynesian area, are very difficult to classify from a zoological 

 standpoint, more especially New Caledonia (of which some of the inverte- 

 brates have been already referred to). The New Hebrides and Fiji are inhabited 

 by Melanesians, while those farther east, like the Tonga group, Samoa, and 

 Hawaii, are the home of the Polynesians, which are of a Caucasian, and not a Negro, 

 type. The true, or brown, Polynesians, commonly known as Kanakas, are met 

 with in their greatest purity in the eastern Polynesian Islands ; the Polynesians 

 of Tonga having a strong infusion of Melanesian blood, while those of Samoa have 

 a slighter strain of the same. Micronesians are Polynesians with a slight mixture 

 of Mongol blood. Polynesians, who have more hair on the body and chin than 

 Mongols, and range as far as Hawaii on the north and Easter Island on the 

 extreme east, probably came originally from northern India, and gradually 

 travelled by way of Java to the Pacific. 



Exclusive of the Solomon group, which is here classed in the Papuan region, 

 the Polynesian Islands have no indigenous mammals except a few bats, and their 



