Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation. 12!7 



1800 miles from the west coast of America, a mere handful of 

 unfortunates must have been caught suddenly in one of those 

 violent western gales that are so frequent in the Southern Pacific, 

 and been blown across the intervening tract of ocean to the 

 American land : landing somewhere in the States of Chili, near 

 Copiapo, in the latitude of Easter Island. And I have expressed 

 my own opinion very strongly that this arrival of a few famished 

 Polynesians on the west coast of America must have taken place 

 some time between twelve and fifteen hundred years before the 

 birth of Christ ; that is sometime between the death of the 

 patriarch Jacob and the exodus of the children of Israel from the 

 land of Egypt. A later date than this would scarcely suffice to 

 account for the dispersion of the Indo-American nations over 

 both continents, originating as they all did, agreeably to the 

 testimony of Baron Humboldt, in one common source, as well as 

 for the multitude of languages that have sprung in the course of 

 long ages from that one source. 



I maintain, further, that the original inhabitants of America, 

 and their more immediate descendauts, had brought along with 

 them, from beyond the Pacific, a comparatively advanced form 

 of civilisation, which they reproduced in those colossal works, of 

 which the wonderful remains in Peru and Mexico have astonished 

 the whole civilised world ; but that this higher civilisation had, 

 from causes unknown to us, died out long before the era of the 

 Spanish conquest. Dr. Von Martius, who maintains that the 

 Indo- Americans are indigenous, created on the spot as an inferior 

 edition of the genus man, and having no connection or relation- 

 ship with any other portion of the human family, nevertheless 

 admits the fact of this higher civilisation having characterised the 

 earlier ages of Indo-American history. " Colossal works of 

 architecture," he tells us, " comparable in extent to the monu- 

 ments of ancient Egypt (as those of Tiahuanaca on the Lake 

 Titicaca, which the Peruvians, as far back as the time of the 

 Spanish conquest, beheld with wonder as the remains of a much 

 more ancient people), bear witness that their inhabitants had, in 

 remote ages, developed a moral power and mental cultivation 

 which have now entirely vanished. A mere semblance of them — 

 an attempt to bring back a period which had long passed by — 

 seems perceptible in the kingdom and institutions of the Incas." 



It would appear, therefore, that long ages, perhaps, before the 

 era of the Spanish conquest, a blight had fallen on the earlier and 

 higher civilisation of the Indo- Americans, and that it had, in a 

 great measure, died out, as it would seem to have done completely 

 all over the Pacific. But if we only take into consideration the 

 remarkably pecculiar circumstances in which the Indo-American 

 nations were placed, as compared with the nations of the West, 

 we shall not be surprised at this seemingly mysterious consum- 



