SOME REMARKS ON THE AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES. 249 



411 am, 'to bind,' ' to be silent'; in the Gospels, the blind man's 

 eyes were 'opened,' and Zacharias, who had been for a time dumb, 

 had ' his mouth opened and his tongue loosed.' The root of our 

 Australian words boko, muga, is therefore the same as the San- 

 skrit mu, 'to bind.' From the same source come the Samoan 

 pu-puni, 'to shut,' po, 'night'; the Aneityumese at-apn-es (apn 

 = pan), ' to shut,' na-poi, 'dark clouds,' the New Britain bog, 

 ■* clouded,' and the Tukiok bog, 'to cover up '; (cf. the Sanskrit 

 bhuka, 'darkness'). In Aneityum, a-pat is 'dark,' 'deaf,' and 

 po-p is 'dumb.' In Malay, puk-kah (cf. mu-ga) is 'deaf,' and 

 bu-ta is 'blind'; ba-bat (cf. ba-ba, bo-bo) is to 'bind'; Fiji has 

 bu-ki-a, 'to tie,' 'to fasten'; New Zealand has pu-pu, 'to tie in 

 bundles,'" pu, 'a tribe,' 'bunch,' 'bundle.' It is even possible that 

 our English words, bind, bunch, bundle, come, through the 

 Anglo-Saxon, from this same root, ba, bu, mu. 



I suppose that these examples will suffice to prove that the 

 similarity between the Australian boko and the Polynesian poko 

 is not a mere coincidence. Where have we room now for the 

 theory that the natives of the South Sea Islands are of Malay 

 origin? I might, with equal justice, say that they came from the 

 Hunter River district in Australia, if I were to look only at the 

 words boko and poko ! 



Results. — The ideas 'blind,' 'deaf,' ' dumb," may be reduced to 

 the simple idea 'bound' — the eyes, ears, mouth or tongue 'closed, 

 bound, tied.' This idea is, in the Aryan languages, expressed 

 mostly by mu, but, in our Eastern languages, by ba, bo; mu, mo, 

 2?u, po; all these root-forms are identical, and are the basis of 

 cognate words spreading from the region of 'ultima Thule^ across 

 the world to Tahiti. Can this be the result of accident, or of the 

 spontaneous creation of language in several different centres ? Is 

 it not rather proof of a common origin 1 Even in the develop- 

 ment of the root, there is a singular correspondence ; for the 

 Sanskrit adds -k a, and so do the Malay, the Kamilaroi, the Santoan, 

 and the Polynesian ; others use t instead of /:. 



7. Miscellaneous words. 



(a.) There are just two or three other words which I would glance 

 •at very rapidly. The Malay kutu means 'louse'; in all Polynesia 

 also that word means 'louse'; therefore, as some persons say, the 

 South Sea islanders must be Malay-Polynesians. But I find that 

 in Aneityum also, a Papuan region, in-ket is 'louse,' and in South 

 Australia kiita. To complete the analogy, these persons should 

 now say that the Papuans of the New Hebrides and the blacks of 

 South Australia are Malay. This looks like a reductio ad absur- 

 d,um. 



