ON THE OEIGIN AND MIGEATIONS OP THE POLYNESIAN NATION. 61 



tary streams would, doubtless, guide the Indian in his progress to 

 the northward ; and it is, accordingly, on the banks of the Ohio, 

 in the "Western prairies, and along the lakes of Canada, that we 

 find the monuments of his ancient power. 



There is therefore a remarkable similarity in the developments 

 of civilisation in the article of national defences or fortifications, 

 on the part of the Indo-American nations and the Polynesians 

 respectively. One is constrained to regard them as the same 

 people, exhibiting, as they do, in circumstances remarkably, 

 diiferent, the same amount of intellectual power and mechanical 

 ability. There are certainly no such palatial residences to be 

 found in the South Sea Islands as those of which we find the 

 ruins in the Indo-American cities of Central America andTucatan. 

 But the reason is obvious — the South Sea Islands afforded no 

 such fields for the establishment of mighty empires, the exercise 

 of kingly power, and the other developments of luxury, as there 

 were in Mexico and Peru and Central America. But I maintain, 

 without fear of contradiction, that there is nothing in the civilisa- 

 tion of these Indo-American empires of the past that is not fairly 

 traceable to a Polynesian source. 



II. I now proceed to the second branch of our subject — to show 

 that the phenomena of language, and of what may be called 

 literature among the aborigines of America, point directly to a 

 Polynesian origin. 



Taking it for granted, therefore, that the theory I have been 

 endeavoring to establish, is well founded, and that America had 

 been originally discovered by a handful of Polynesians from Easter 

 Island, who had been caught suddenly, when perhaps fishing off" 

 the coast of that island in one of those violent westerly gales that 

 are so prevalent in the Southern Pacific, and had been driven 

 before the wind to the American land, what are the phenomena 

 in regard to language which this theory would lead us to antici- 

 pate — supposing as I have done that the forefathers of the Indo- 

 American race in both continents had landed on the west coast 

 of South America, somewhere near Copiapo, in the Republic of 

 Chili, and that the future migrations of their descendants, north, 

 east, and south, had commenced from that point ? Why, we 

 should expect, as a matter of course, that the Polynesian character 

 of the language or languages spoken by the Indo-American 

 people would be retained the most strongly in the region in which 

 the forefathers of the race had first landed. Now this is precisely 

 what we find to be the actual fact. De Zuniga, the historian of 

 the Philippine Islands, a most unexceptionable witness in such 

 a case, informs us that the words of the language of the Arauca- 

 nian Indians of Chili, contained in the work of Er9illa, the his- 

 torian of that people, are strikingly conformable, hastante coti formes, 

 to those of the language of Tagala, one of the districts of the 



