ON THE LANGUAGES OF OCEANIA. 359 
than elsewhere. It is true that in some of the Polynesian groups 
a scarcity of food and sometimes starvation are not uncommon, 
and that tends to darken the skin by bringing a black pigment to 
the surface; but the grossness of type to which I refer cannot 
arise from that cause. 
Then you have asked me how so many root-words of Aryan 
derivation have come to exist in the Polynesian languages. My 
Opinion is that the Polynesian forefathers were an Aryan and 
Indo-Germanic race who came from India, perhaps some centuries 
before the Christian era, and took possession of the islands of 
Indonesia nearest to the mainland, driving the previous negroid 
inhabitants into the interior of their islands, (for many blacks are 
still there) and further east and south into Melanesia and Aus- 
tralia. 
If these things are so, then these fair Caucasians—fairer than the 
present Bengalies, whose location on the flats of the Ganges area 
has doubtless deepened their colour in the course of ages—we 
may readily suppose that these fair Caucasians brought with them 
the language and religion of the Vedas—or, at least, one of the 
Aryan Prakrits of India such as the Pali, which we have found: 
to have, in some directions, so close a relation to the present Poly- 
nesian tongue. This would also account for the fact that, in the 
early centuries, Brahmanism is found established in the Sunda 
Islands and those adjacent, and that to this hour that cult remains 
there, though inacorrupted form. Here also, as I imagine, arose 
that reverential respect for chiefs as representatives of deity, and 
that use of peculiar words of respect in their presence and to them, 
which at this hour make the Eastern Polynesian manners so 
different from those of Melanesia. Up to the present day, the 
common people in the Sunda Islands must address their superiors 
in a special language of courtesy which is mostly Aryan—a survival 
from earlier times—and many amusing blunders are made by a 
subject when he appears at Court and has to use a language which 
is not his vernacular. This, certainly, must also have been the 
experience of the subject black races in these islands when in the 
