Origin and Migrations oftJie Polynesian Nation. 115 



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 

 different, 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 and Yucatan. 

 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 civili- 

 sation 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 

 endeavouring 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, aud 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 anticipate — 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 mi orations of their 

 descendents, 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 lauded. 

 Now this is precisely what we find to be the actual fact. De 

 Zunina. the historian of the Philippine Islands, a most unexcep- 

 tional witness in such a case, informs us that the words of the 

 language of the Araucauian Indians of Chili, contained in the 

 work of Ercilla, the historian of that people, are strikingly con- 

 formable, bastante conformes, to those of the language of Tagala, 

 one of the districts of the Philippines I mav add, in passing, 

 that one of our own respected members, Mr. Edward Hill, who 

 spent four years of his life in sailing amongst the South Sea 

 Islands, and who knows, perhaps, more about their inhabitants 



