ORIGIN. 
433 
spears to a considerable distance, and use the bow 
and arrow, which the others only employ in their 
amusements. 
The difference in their physical character is 
greater; the dark complexion, woolly hair, and 
slender make, indicate them to be a different 
people. 
Various points of resemblance have been shewn 
between the aborigines of America and the natives 
of the eastern islands of the Pacific, in their modes 
of war, instruments, gymnastic games, rafts or 
canoes, treatment of their children, dressing their 
hair, feather head-dresses of the chiefs, girdles, 
and particularly the tiputa of the latter, which, in 
shape and use, exactly resembles the poncho of 
the Peruvians. 
These circumstances seem to favour the con¬ 
jecture, that the inhabitants of the islands west of 
Tongatabu have an Asiatic origin entirely; but 
that the natives of the eastern islands may be a 
mixed race, who have emigrated from the Ame¬ 
rican continent, and from the Asiatic islands; that 
the proximity of the Friendly and Figii islands 
may have given both a variety of words and usages 
in common, while the people to which the former 
belong have remained in many respects distinct. 
The nation inhabiting the eastern parts of the 
Pacific has spread itself over an immense tract of 
ocean, extending upwards of seventy degrees north 
and south from New Zealand and Chatham Island 
to the Sandwich group, and between sixty and 
seventy degrees east and west from Tongatabu to 
Easter Island. This last is not farther from the 
islands adjacent to the continent than some of 
these groups are from any other inhabited island. 
The Sandwich Islands are above twenty degrees 
iv. 2 F 
