Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation. 89 



from some otber island in the group, and rafted across the sea, as 

 the island of Tongataboo, or Tonga the holy, is entirely of coral 

 formation, and has no stone of any kind on its perfectly level 

 surface. The construction of such a monument implies a high 

 degree of mechanical skill on the part of the ancient Polynesians, 

 and is altogether incomprehensible as a work of man by their 

 semi-barbarous descendants. In the Island of Ascension also, 

 an island situated in the Northern Pacific, in latitude 7 degrees 

 IS"., I have been informed by a gentleman of this city, who once 

 visited the island as a surgeon of a vessel, there are colossal 

 architectural remains, in the form of a wall of thirty feet in 

 height, constructed of immense blocks of stone, and apparently 

 intended for the protection and defence of a commodious harbour. 

 Although it were impossible to fix the exact time when the 

 fathers of the Polynesian nations, issuing forth from the Indian 

 Archipelago, launched out, or rather were driven out by some 

 violent westerly gale, into the boundless Pacific, there are two 

 distinct notes of time that may serve to guide us in our enquiries 

 on the subject. The language of the Malays, which I have shewn 

 is of cognate origin with the Polynesian, has had two different 

 infusions into it from foreign tongues, at periods very far distant 

 from each other. The latest of these, which I shall dispose of 

 first, is an Arabic infusion, coeval, as I conceive, with the Saracen 

 invasion of the East, and the conversion of the Malays to the 

 religion of Mahomet. There are hundreds of Arabic words, 

 generally of a rough consonantal character, imbedded, so to speak, 

 in the Malay language, which, like those of Polynesia, is pecu- 

 liarly soft and vocalic ; these foreign words resembling a number 

 of rough detached pebblea frozen into a sheet of ice. Unac- 

 quainted with this historical fact, Mr. Ellis, the author of the 

 work, entitled " Polynesian Researches," adduces in support of 

 his own unfounded theory, and that of the Spaniard, De Zuniga, 

 whom he follows, that the South Sea Islanders could not have 

 come from the west, the Malay word shems, the sun, is altogether 

 unlike the corresponding Polynesian word ra or la. But shems is 

 a pure Arabic word, the cognate of the Hebrew word shemesh, as 

 in the scripture name Bethshemesh, the house of the sun, and is 

 doubtless coeval as a Malay word with the Mahometan irruption, 

 perhaps a thousand years since. It is evident, therefore, that 

 the Polynesian migration from the Indian Archipelago is of a much 

 more ancient date than that of the Mahometan irruption ; 

 for there are no Arabic words in the language of the 

 South Sea Islands But in a passage I have already quoted, 

 Sir Stamford Raffles -speaks of a much more ancient 

 and -foreign infusion, which had introduced into the Malayan 

 branch of the one original languge of ihe Indian Archipelago and 

 Polynesia, thousands of words of Sanscrit origin, indicating, in his 



