ON THE ‘LANGUAGES OF OCEANIA. 345 
stoutly maintains that the Polynesian dialects come from a pre- 
Vedic form of the original Aryan speech, and that the Malay words 
in it area recent and adventitious element. He devotes the whole 
of his third volume to a philological examination of the root-words 
in Polynesian, with the view of showing that they have near 
kindred among both the eastern and the western members of 
the Aryan family. 
Although that is the most recent of English books on the sub- 
ject, yet the same problem has occupied the attention of English 
minds for over a hundred years. From the time that Captain 
Cook returned from his discoveries in the South Seas, and roused 
curiosity by bringing with him to England the islander Omai, 
“that gentle savage,” a strong desire existed there to know more 
of the Islands and their history, past and present; but the war 
of American Independence and the wars of Revolutionary France 
prevented. During that period of unrest, Johann Reinhold 
Forster had published in French his “ Observations Made in a 
Voyage Round the World” (London, 1778). Forster was a Ger- 
man who had settled in England and visited the South Seas as 
naturalist to Cook’s Second Expedition. In his “ Observations” 
he speaks of the Polynesian languages, and says that the existence 
in them of words the same as those in the Malay region does not 
imply that the Eastern Polynesians have come from the Malays, 
but that the two tongues and peoples proceed from some more 
ancient race, which held possession of the East Indian Islands. 
It was this theory which K. W. von Humboldt reproduced in an 
altered form, and which, under the sanction of his name, has 
gained currency as the Malayo-Polynesian. 
The next English authority on this subject is John Crawfurd, 
the writer of the “ History of the Indian Archipelago.” In early 
life, he had been British resident at the Court of Java, and had 
made himself well acquainted with the language and character of 
the Malays. Ina dissertation attached to his “Grammar and 
Dictionary of the Malay Language” (London, 1852), he entirely 
rejects the Malayo-Polynesian descent from a common mother 
