242 
ill their common superimposing of figures one on top of another; the 
elaborate scroll-work so characteristic of all Maori carving is quite 
foreign to our west-coast natives. We can liardly conceive of a direct 
migration from Polynesia to British (’olumbia, and if the house-posts 
m the latter region were inspired from abroad, why do they not 
appear farther south along the coast of North America?^ It would 
be easier to accept the theory of a migration across the Pacific if all 
the culture parallels between the Indians and the iNIalayo-Polynesians 
were concentrated in one part of America, whether British Columbia, 
California, or Peru, But when writers attribute to these immigrants 
customs as widely diffused as masked ritual dances, which were 
practised from South America to Ontario and British Columbia, and 
terrace-cultivation, employed from Peru to Arizona — when they 
ascribe to the same source the tree-dwellings of tropical South Am- 
erica, the blow-gun known from Brazil to Ontario, and the bark- 
beaters used from Brazil to British Columbia, we begin to wonder why 
immigrants numerous enough to affect so i)rofoundly the cultures of 
the tribes in two contineJits should yet have disappeared so com- 
jhetely witliin a thousand years that their very existence is open to 
serious question. 
We must frankly admit, however, that certain analogies between 
the two regions are too striking to dismiss without grave considera- 
tion, and too numerous, in the aggregate, to seem the result of pure 
chance. If we agree that the “ Lagoa. Santa ” i>eople were racially 
akin to the Melanesians,- we must either subscribe to a migration 
across the southern Pacific, or regard the Melanesians and the “Lagoa 
Santa ” peojde as descendants of a race that divided in Asia and sent 
one branch to the southeast, through the Malay archipelago, and 
the other into America, by the same route, presumably, as the fore- 
fathers of our other Indians. The wide distribution of “ Lagoa 
Santa” remains, and the apparent age of some of them,'’^ seem to 
favour the latter hypothesis. Again, if the Hokan group of languages 
really belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian stock, we must acquiesce in 
its introduction by way of the southern Pacific; but the arguments 
in support of this relationship have not yet been subjected to a rigor- 
1 The early i^iiaiiish exiiiorers nieation what (.iccui to In* the totem-poles in Chile. L.'ieliain H F ■ 
‘‘The Totemi.sm of the .Ancient .Andean Peophjs” ; Jour. Royal AnOironological Institute* voi o 72 
(London, 1927). , oi. p. 
2 For a contrary oi)inion Sec Urdlicka. A.: “The Urigin and .Antiquity of the .American Indian”- 
-Ann. Kept., Board of Regents of the Smith. Inst., 1923, |>. 493 (Wa.shingtoii. I92.>). 
3 e.g. the Punin calvarium. Sf'e Sullivan and Hellnuiii ; Op. cit. 
