LANGUAGE OF RACES 
accompanied Captain Wilson to England, acknowledged that he and 
his companions were part of the crew of one of three piratical 
praus. 
Casual wrecks like this might easily have carried the Malayan lan¬ 
guage to the most westerly of the islands of the Pacific, within the 
tropics ; while adventures, like that of the Chain Island canoe, would 
in the lapse of ages, convey it, step by step, to Easter Island and 
the Sandwich group. 
This explanation would sufficiently account for the dissemination 
of the Malayan language over the tropical islands of the Pacific; but, 
it must he admitted that there are greater difficulties in respect to 
the large islands of New Zealand, the nearest portion of which is 
35° from the equator and, consequently, within the region of varia¬ 
ble winds and tempests. 
The same difficulty, however, it should be observed, exists in at¬ 
tempting to account for the fact of the New Zealand islands being 
peopled, throughout, by the Polynesian race, speaking the Polyne¬ 
sian language. By some means or other, practicable to a rude peo¬ 
ple, an intercourse, we may he quite sure, took place between these 
islands and the infcertropical ones inhabited by the same race of men, 
speaking the same language—since men are no more horn with lan¬ 
guage than with mathematics—are born, in a word, only with a ca¬ 
pacity to acquire both, equally branches of acquired knowledge. 
For New Zealand, then, notwithstanding the difficulties of the voy¬ 
age, whether from e Malay Archipelago, or between it and the hi- 
tertropical islands of the Pacific, tempest-driven praus, or fleets of 
praus, are our only resource for a rational explanation. 
A brief examination of the cultivated plants and domesticated ani¬ 
mals of the Polynesian Islands, on their first discovery by Europeans, 
may, perhaps, be thought to throw some light on the mode in which 
their languages received an infusion of Malayan, 
The following were the plants,—the cocoa-nut, the bread-fruit, 
the yam, the batata, the taro, the sugar-cane, the orange, the bana¬ 
na, the bamboo, and the paper-mulberry. Every one of these is a 
native of the Indian Archipelago ; but if the Malayan nations brought 
h 2 
