52 SIDNEY H. RAY. 
Unlimited facilities for intercourse in war and peace exist, with 
consequent mingling of speech and customs. In Oceania, cn the 
other hand, the languages are those of insular populations, 
separated, it is true, in many cases by narrow channels, but yet 
so separated as to be prevented from enjoying the close intercourse 
to which a stream or a range of hills would be no barrier. In the 
continental and insular regions the languages affect one another 
in different ways. ‘ Languages of a continent touch each other 
at their circumferences and may or may not graduate into each — 
other. Languages of aii archipelago are definitely bounded. We 
always know where their circumference is limited. The limit is 
the sea and the sea is mute.”* In America or Africa the contact 
of languages would thus affect only the outlying portions of a 
large territory. The inhabitants of the central region, surrounded 
on all sides by people akin to themselves in speech, race and 
religion, may be supposed to have retained in its purest form the 
characteristics of the original language and race. In Oceania the 
tendency is in a different direction. Except on the larger islands 
the territory occupied by kindred tribes is small, and we may 
conceive the original tongue broken up into distinct portions. If 
another race or language varying in any degree, nay, even another 
dialect of the same language be introduced, it affects the whole of 
the language spoken in a particular district and not merely a 
portion of it. This process being repeated ad infinitum, the 
result is a mixed language differing in many respects from its 
neighbours and often resembling that of distant islands. Hence 
arises the peculiar difficulty in ascertaining the origin of any par- 
ticular language of Oceania. The continuous introduction of 
dialects from all parts renders it well-nigh impossible to discover 
the original speech, or even to determine whether the languages, 
as now found, are superposed upon older or more primitive forms 
of speech. 
In another respect the languages of Oceania are of importance. 
They afford material by which the psychologist may study the 
* R. G. Latham—Comparative Philogy, p. 4.. 
