Vaux.—On the Probable Origin of the Maori Races. | 57 
capacity seem to have gone out of fashion, at all events they are rarely 
now seen at any of the islands. Moerenhout, however, in his interesting 
voyage, states that he found such canoes in use among the people of the 
Paumatoa group, and with this unusual facility of construction, that they 
could be sailed whichever way their owners pleased by shifting their sails 
and rudder. Such vessels would, doubtless, have been quite fit to traverse 
very great distances.. I believe that boats similar to these may be occa- 
sionally seen in the Fiji and Caroline Islands. 
I have already noticed that as you proceed from West to East it is a 
peculiarity of the Polynesian languages that they have fewer consonants, 
till at the Marquesas those are reduced to six, and it has been very generally 
asserted that this loss is a striking sign of degeneracy. But I am not so 
sure that this is a true view to take. 
Many of these changes, or rather modifications, are, I suspect due to 
climate, and certainly this is the case in well-known European examples. 
We may have a great, a natural respect for Highlanders ; they may be, as 
they often are in our minds, the symbols of all that is manly, or brave, or 
virtuous ; but it does not follow, indeed is not true, that the Italians, for 
instance, are as a body an effeminate race, though their language, from its 
vocalic character, lends itself more readily to love and music than the 
harsher languages of the North. Nor, indeed, is this true among the 
Islanders themselves. If the so-calléd effeminate Marquesans have only 
six consonants, the Maoris have but two more, and assuredly effeminacy 
could not be predicated of them as a race. Let us look a little nearer home, 
and see what has been done in the changes of the Old Classical Latin in 
the Romance dialects, and when we find in modern French such words as 
Augustus expressed by Adut (only two vowel sounds, maturus by ‘“ mir,” 
ligare, by lier, age (through étage) from etas, let us not accuse even the 
Hawaiians or Marquesans as though a prevalence of vowels and a corres- 
ponding paucity of consonants was any proof of weakness in a language. 
Nor do I believe, as I have hinted previously, that, as a matter of fact, the 
Polynesian dialects are as deficient in vocal or consonantal sounds as we 
should infer that they are from the grammars and dictionaries already 
published. I suspect we have done the native languages much injustice, 
partly from the ignorance (not an ignorance worthy of blame), on the part 
of those who first reduced them to writing, of any principles of philology, 
and partly, also, from these varying sounds having been committed to 
paper by persons whose ears had not been accurately trained to the recogni- 
tion of the niceties between sounds apparently similar. Had the Missionary 
Alphabet, drawn up chiefly by Professor Lepsius and Max Miiller, been 
G 
