POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
423 
Eleven would be Ahum niatahi, ten and one; and so on 
to twenty, which was simply Erua ahum, two tens; 
twenty-one, two tens and one; and proceeding in this 
way till ten tens, or one hundred, which they called a 
Rau, The same method was repeated for every succes¬ 
sive rau, or hundred, till ten had been enumerated, and 
these they called one Mano^ or thousand. They con¬ 
tinued in the same way to enumerate the units, ahurus 
or tens, raus or hundreds, and manos or thousands, 
until they had counted ten manos, or thousands; this 
they called a Manotiniy or ten thousand. Continuing the 
same process, they counted ten manotinis, "which they 
called a Rehuy or one hundred thousand. Advancing 
still farther, they counted ten rehus, which they called 
an luy which was ten hundred thousand, or one 
million. 
They had no higher number than the iuy or million ? 
they could, however, by means of the above terms or 
combinations, enumerate, with facility, tens, hundreds, 
thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands 
of millions. 
The precision, regularity, and extent of their numbers 
has often astonished me; and how a people, having, com¬ 
paratively speaking, but little necessity to use calculation 
and being destitute of a knowledge of figures, should have 
originated and matured such a system, is still wonderful, 
and appears, more than any other fact, to favour the 
opinion that these islands were peopled from a country 
whose inhabitants were highly civilized. 
Many of their numerals are precisely the same as 
those used by the people of several of the Asiatic 
islands, and also in the remote and populous island of 
Madagascar. Occasionally the Islanders double the 
