210 
ON THE MALAYAN AND POLYNESIAN 
the sun, in Bali. The elephant is unquestionably a native of Su¬ 
matra and the Malay Peninsula, but the popular name for it in a> 
least eight languages of these countries is the Sanscrit word gajc r. 
There is, indeed, a native one, biram , in Malay, but it is obsolete 
or little known. 
Instead of the elementary words of language being those most 
widely spread, the reverse in the case* Such words are the rarest 
to be found in many languages, and some of the most essential have 
not been disseminated at all, but are found to he distinct in each se¬ 
parate language. In fact, the class of words most widely diffused, 
are in a great measure extrinsic, and the offspring of a considerable 
advancement in civilization ; such, for example, as the names of cul¬ 
tivated, useful, or familiar plants ; those of domesticated, useful, ox 
familiar animals ; terms connected with numeration, fishing, naviga¬ 
tion, agriculture, the mechanical arts, the calendar, war, govern¬ 
ment, and even literature. 
If, then, one language only had ever existed, we are reduced to 
the necessity of supposing that the people who spoke it were one 
race, and that they were in a social state of considerable advance¬ 
ment before they were dispersed, and their language broken down 
into the chaos of tongues at present existing, an hypothesis without 
the shadow of a proof. 
Had such a language ever existed, we would not have failed to 
have the same kind of evidence of it, which the modern languages 
of the south of Europe afford of the existence of Latin, that is, a 
virtual agreement in the most familiar nouns, adjectives, pronouns, 
verbs, prepositions, and particles ; but of this there is nothing what¬ 
ever in the languages of the Archipelago, or Pacific. 
There are but two languages in the Indian and Pacific Islands 
that have been widely spread, the Malay in the first, and the Poly¬ 
nesian in the last; and the evidence of a common origin in these, 
is as satisfactorily shown in their dialects, as that yielded by the 
French, Spanish, and Italian, of their common origin in Latin. 
It remains to consider how the principal languages of Sumatra 
and. Java, the Malay and Javanese, came to be so widely dissemi- 
