462 
APPENDIX. 
of the islands of Eastern Polynesia have a common origin ; while 
some of the legends published by Sir George Grey would seem 
to intimate, that the relations between the Sandwich Islanders 
and the inhabitants of New Zealand must have been more than 
ordinarily close. The Hawaiki, so conspicuous in the ancient 
traditions of New Zealand, as the country whence its population 
was derived, would seem to indicate a near relationship with Ila- 
waii, the present name of the largest of the Sandwich Islands, 
and may probably connect both with Sawaii , the largest of the 
Navigator’s group, and situated midway between them. The pro¬ 
bability that the h of the Eastern Polynesians has been supplanted 
by the s in the dialect of the Navigator’s Islanders favours this 
conclusion, and assists in solving the difficulty resulting from 
the distance. It is not improbable that, at some remote period 
anterior to the introduction of the sibilant of the Western Poly¬ 
nesians into the language of the Navigator’s Islands, and when 
the principal island of the latter group would be designated 
Hawaii, voyagers proceeding thence in a south-easterly direction 
reached New Zealand; while others proceeding westward, by 
way of Raiatea and Tahiti, and then northward, ultimately arrived 
at the Sandwich Islands, and gave the name of the land they had 
left to the home they had found. 
Not less remarkable is the extension of this language westward 
to Madagascar. The western point of this island is not three 
hundred miles from the shores of Africa, yet but comparatively 
few words of African origin have been found in the language of 
its inhabitants. On the other hand, the nearest island of the 
Asiatic A.rcliipelago is 3000 miles to the eastward of Madagascar, 
and yet the resemblance between the language spoken by their 
respective inhabitants is as close as between that of the former 
and the Eastern Polynesians. All the Malagasy words already 
adduced as Polynesian are also Malayan words, and the list of 
words apparently identical in all three might be greatly increased. 
Considerable differences, nevertheless, exist among the dialects 
spread over so vast a surface; but all of them contain words 
which seem to have belonged to some of the earliest languages, 
such as the word for father, in Malagasy, baba, and baba, papa, or pa, 
