ON THE LANGUAGES OF OCEANIA. 361 
Melanesia, whose way of receiving strangers does not encourage 
settlement ; for it is destructive. In this sense, one of the best 
known of our missionaries, who has laboured long in that region, 
said to a friend who urged, ‘ Don’t you think that many canoe 
loads of men, drifting from other islands, have settled among 
these Papuans”; “Oh! no”; was the reply, ‘‘the strangers, as 
soon as they came ashore, were only clubbed and eaten.” And 
that is quite true; although, from the well-known caprice of savages, 
influenced as they often are by any passing emotion, many fairer- 
skinned immigrants may have been allowed to land and live among 
the coast tribes of New Guinea and other islands near by. In. 
stances of that kind are well-known in several of the Ebudan 
islands. 
I think, therefore, that the first ancestors of the Eastern Poly- 
nesians, when they began to move, passed northwards in the 
Archipelago, and, keeping black New Guinea on the right and 
Fiji, at last reached Manu‘a in Samoa, which, according to con- 
current tradition, was their first resting place. I wish we could 
tell the date at which this took place, but it was probably not 
much more than a thousand years ago; for the settlement of some 
of the eastern groups is known to be comparatively recent, and 
the royal genealogies which we have from Samoa, Hawaii, and 
elsewhere, do not cover more than thirty or forty generations, and 
the earlier portions of some of these are evidently fabulous. <At 
all events, whenever the stream of emigration from Indonesia set 
in, it continued to flow, and probably always by the same route, to 
avoid the dangers of the fierce Melanesian region lying between. 
The arrival of the Malays in force in the Archipelago quickened 
this current to the east, and did much for the full peopling of the 
HKastern Isles. The Malays themselves may have been so long 
resident in Farther India as to lose much of their monosyllabic 
Mongolian speech; but certain it is that, once settled in the 
Archipelago, they adopted much of the forms of speech which they 
found already there; for, although the Malay grammar is non- 
Aryan and very simple, yet their system of word-construction is 
