110 
THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
with brachycephalic crania others are intermingled which have mesaticephalic and even 
dolichocephalic proportions. From what quarter then has the race proceeded which has 
given this more pronounced length to the skull ? There can, I think, be little doubt that 
this is due to a mixture with a Melanesian element. What the relation may be as 
regards time when the Polynesians and Melanesians first colonised their respective 
islands, which in short is the older race, is of course very difficult to say, though I am 
inclined to think that the Melanesians have the greater antiquity. Various considerations 
might be advanced in support of this position. The proficiency of the Polynesians in 
agriculture, in native manufactures, in the art of carving, their songs and traditions, 
their treatment of women, their submission to the government of chiefs, and their 
religious observances, all point to the Polynesians as having reached a stage of civilization 
which places them in advance of the pure Papuans. But the fact that dolichocephalic 
heads are much more generally diffused throughout the Polynesian area, than are brachy- 
cephalic heads throughout the Melanesian area, points to the conclusion that the Pacific 
Islands generally were at some remote period inhabited by a dolichocephalic and 
probably Papuan race, which in several islands has been entirely replaced by the 
Polynesians, in others very much intermingled with them,— so that the present 
inhabitants are a mixed race, — whilst in others again it has retained its pristine purity. 
How extensive this diffusion has been is shown by the considerable proportion of dolicho- 
cephalic crania which have been procured from islands so far removed from each other as 
the Sandwich Islands in the North and New Zealand in the South Pacific. The people 
of Humphrey’s Island in the Manaluki group, about 700 miles west of the Marquesas 
Islands, are said by the Rev. George Turner to be light brown eastern Polynesians, but 
the inhabitants of Penrhyn’s Island, in the same archipelago, have been described by 
Mr W. L. Ranken 1 as tall, dark brown, with wavy hair sometimes frizzled into mops, 
and with prominent noses, all which characters are Papuan. Penrhyn’s Island has been 
regarded as the most easterly home of the Melanesians. Although we know but little of 
the craniology of the remote and solitary Easter Island, and although the inhabitants 
are said to be Polynesians from Rarotonga, 2 yet the only skull from this island, so far as 
I know, in any collection, viz., that in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, has, 
according to Prof. Flower, a breadth index 69 T and a height index 72'9. In both these 
particulars its characters are Melanesian and not Polynesian. The study of the crania in 
the Polynesian area has led me therefore to a conclusion similar to that arrived at by 
Mr W. L. Ranken from a consideration of other data, viz., that the South Sea Islands 
had been inhabited by Papuans prior to the Mahori colonisation. 
The Gilbert Islanders , again, in the Micronesian area have apparently a large 
admixture of Melanesian blood. Of the twenty-two skulls in the Godeffroy Museum, 
1 Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. vi. p. 231, 1877. 
Meinicke, Die Inseln des stillen Oceans, Zweiter Theil, p. 229. 
