272 The Oceanic Languages Shemitic : a Discovery. 



so far as it speaks, is totally against it, for it shows that the 

 Malays emigrated to Malacca from the islands, and not vice 

 versa. Ethnology gives no utterance for, and unambiguous 

 utterance against it, inasmuch as it cannot account for the 

 negro element of blood, but not of language, among the 

 Oceanians, and it cannot account for such facts, for instance, 

 as that the Tannese and some others in the New Hebrides 

 dress their hair in the very remarkable style of the ancient 

 Assyrians, which obtained among no other Asiatic people. 

 But I refrain from a comparison of customs. Geography, 

 which at first sight appears to be for it, turns out, on closer 

 examination, to be more against it, inasmuch as it utterly 

 fails to account for the peopling of Madagascar, which the 

 other theory most satisfactorily does. Therefore the theory 

 of the peopling of Oceania from South-Eastern Asia fails 

 from the utter want of evidence to support it. And I have 

 already shown that all the evidence obtainable, philological, 

 ethnological, geographical, and historical, harmonises into a 

 body of proof irresistibly establishing that South-Western 

 Asia, or the Shemitic mainland of Oceania, at the time 

 when the Shemites were supreme in civilisation, navigation,, 

 and commerce, was the home from which hived off the 

 people whose descendants we now find inhabiting these isles 

 of the sea. 



Secondly, this discovery has an important bearing upon 

 the evolution theory : in so far as that theory endeavours 

 to draw support from the existence of savages, and the sup- 

 position that they are descended — or shall I say ascended ? 

 — from "hairy quadrupeds," it tends utterly to overthrow 

 it ; for it shows, as to one of the greatest bodies of savages, 

 that they are descended from the most renowned and 

 civilised people of antiquity. 



Thirdly, I consider this discovery more important on the 

 whole than that of the Assyrian or Euphratean inscriptions, 

 deciphered of late with such marvellous ingenuity. In 

 these inscriptions we have only a fragment of the dead 

 language of a lost people, but very valuable as throwing a 

 happy light upon historical parts of Holy Scripture. But here 

 we have, so to speak, that people found, their language full- 

 orbed and in all its living vigour. It will probably be found 

 that every recorded word of ancient Sh. has its cognate in 

 Oc; and, in investigating and illustrating the meaning of 

 the words and the grammatical usages of the Hebrew and 



