ON THE LANGUAGES OF OCEANIA. 347 
of Caucasian and Mongolian blood ; (3.) the brown Polynesians — 
are Aryan, that is, Caucasian, in their origin and language, and, 
passing through India from the Aryan home in Central Asia, 
they occupied Indonesia long before the Mongoloid Malays came 
there ; (4.) the black men of Melanesia and the brown men of 
Polynesia are only variant forms and aspects of the same Oceanic 
race. All these solutions agree in believing that the first ancestors 
of the Polynesians came from Asia. In addition to these, there 
are a few other theories, but they have no ethnological weight, 
either in themselves or from those who hold them ; for instance, 
it is said (1.) that the Polynesians came from America; (2.) that 
the Polynesian area is one of many centres of the creation of races, 
and that thus these people have an independent origin; (3.) to 
account for the presence of a Polynesian language in Madagascar, 
it is said that there was once a land connection between that 
island and Indonesia through the Seychelles and other groups of 
islands in the Indian Ocean; just as some naturalists say that 
Western Australia and the Cape of Good Hope must bave been 
once connected in a similar way, because the heaths of their indi- 
genous flora are so much alike. 
This, then, being the state of the question, I proceed now to 
examine the Malayo-Polynesian theory. And at the outset, I — 
would have you observe that this theory is founded entirely on an 
observed similarity of words in the two languages. The physical 
features of the races and their religion—both of which are known 
to be valuable tests of ethnic relationship—are not taken into 
account at all; and in these two respects the races are quite un- 
like. The discussion of the question, therefore, is one for the 
linguist rather than the ethnologist. And as the Samoan is the 
only Polynesian dialect that I know sufficiently, I will compare 
chiefly the Samoan with the Malay. 
In Mr. Pratt’s Samoan Dictionary (3rd edition) there are 
between seven and eight thousand words; probably about a 
thousand of them may be regarded as primary and uncompounded, 
and of these again about one hundred simple words are identical 
