The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1878-02-16

know not tue uate or the nrse edltlOn-and atte
balancing the pro and con of the question says
p. 122, V. l., that : a variety of facts connecte
with the past and present circumstances of til
inhabitants OF those countries, authorize the con
clusion, that, either part OF the present iGhabit
ants of the South Sea Islands came Originally
from America, or that tribeS of the Poiynesian
hare, at some remote period, found their ,cay Il
the continent Mr.. Ellis, however, with charac
t%eristic modesty and literary wisdom, refrain
from sounding his praises and to claim as a dis
covery what at best is but a suggestion. A
Doctor Lang undoubtedly had the first or second
edition of Mr.. Ellis work before him, for h
quotes from it frequently, it is hardly credible
that he should not have observed the above sug.
gestion of Mr.. Ellis and thus been aware that the
paternity and priority of the idea were not hi:
exclusively; and yet he utters not a word in &C
acknowledgement of that fact, but boldly claims
the idea as bis own undivided discovery. Doctor
Lang, it is true, includes Rev. Mr.. Williams in
his sweeping denunciations, but cOntrives in an
apologetic way to screen Mr.. Williams from the
full blast of his censure by considering him as
merely the tool of Mr.. Ellis, who published Mr..
Williams work and who manipulated, added, al
tered and corrected it to suit his own pleasure, to
the irreparable and never-to-be-forgotten loss OF
the much injured Doctor Lang. The Doctor ad-
mits that Mr.. Williams was . one of Natures
Noblemen, - but then, notwithstanding Nature S
patent of Nobility, he was 9 an uneducated man
and a mere working blacksmith when he entered
the service of the London Missionary Society -
Hence the Doctor throws all the burden of his
odium on the shoulders of Mr.. Ellis.
The Doctor says that he was not aware of this
fearful plagiarism, this literary theft-for he ac-
cuses Mr.. Ellis of having actually 80 stolen " the
substance of his book, the three great discoveries,
. to complete and embellish Mr.. Williams Mar
r~ative, until 1889, and having held his breath
and nursed his wrath for thirty-eight years he
can restrain himself no longer. But be the Doc
tor right or wrong in his accusations-for his in
vectlves are unpardonable-we should think that,
after thlrty-eight years silence, the nobler and
kinder way would have been to leave his claims
to other hands for vindicatiOn. "Time sets all
things even,'' and in this age of literary activity,
had there been any merits in the Doctors claims,
men of science would not have been slow to
award them to him.
1t is always an ungrateful, as it is an unpleasant
task to prick the bubble of another mans vanity,
to destroy an illusion of many years
standing; but Doctor Lang mercilessly inYOkes
the 8 de mOrtuiS nil niSi reruhn, - and ruthlessly
attempts to tarnish the good names of the Rev.
Messrs. Ellis and Williams Be it so. The dead
have no better panoply than truth, and when the
Doctor finds his poisoned arrows rebound upon
himself, he may remember the old saying that
- curses come home to roost."
We have SAID thus much in disproval Of Doc
tor Lang's claims to originality, and in defence of
the honored dead. We now proceed to consider
the merits of the so-called discovery, whether
original with Doctor Lang or others.
With the first proposition of the first discovery
that 81 the POlynesians are of Asiatic origin"
we fully concur, though the Doctor rather
leaves it to be inferred from the second PROPOSE
tion-that they are s. of Malay race than de-
monstrates it on independent grounds. But when,
In proof OF the first position, he advances the
similarity of Caste, Tabu and other Customs in
India under Brahmanic regime, and then attempts
to prove the extreme antiquity of the separation
OF the Polynesians from the Malay mother stock
by the assumed fact of the absence of Sanskrit
xpnrIC in kLA lyAac1 d. e Al Nj
commits u singular. anachronism and upsets his
own argument. For, if Brahmanic Caste, Tabu,
culture and words only came to the Malay peoples
after the separation of the Polynesians, their ex-
istence among the latter can certainly be no
argument for their Asiatic origin, nor vet for
their Malay extraction. The origin of these GUS
toms among the Polynesians, therefore, must be
looked for in another direction and through anoth-
er channel than that of the Malays.
We have not space at our command, nor does
1T comport with our purpose to pick up the minor
inexactitudes, frequent exaggerations and wrong
differences occurring in the work before US. But |
when it is minated that the Polynesian system
of Caste was a copy of the Brahminical pattern. |
the Doctor betrays his Ignorance Of both modern
and ancient POlynesian customs. Through the
entire framework OF Polynesian society, throagh
all Its past traditional records, there are no indi-
cations of the Brahminical system of Caste.
Caste there was, or. rather, classification of
society, but that classification was conformable to
that which obtained among the pre-Brahminical,
pre- Nedic Arians and among the Cushite families,
and was in direct contrast to the developed or
ganization Of Castles prevailing in India under
Brahminical rule. In Polynesia the Nobility,
the Ali, occupied the first rank in society; the
freemen, the land-hOlders, the Makaanana or,
Rdngdtlra, occupied the second. and the slaves,
the KautvG makdlUela, the third. Throughout
the Priests never existed as a Caste in
the Brahminical sense; they were the subjects
ever, and often the mere tools of the Chiefs.
Had Doctor Lang made himself acquainted with
PolynesIan Folk-lore-a rather important factor
IN calculating the past of a people,-he would
have learnt that, at the time when the Polvne-
slams emigrated from the Indian Archipelago' the
was not a Caste, least of all a sumo
rlor Caste; that some of the ancient legends re-
ferring to that period speak of the Priest as one
of the Retainers of the Chief, who frequently
the priestly functions himself; that al
though IN alter ages the immunitions and priyi-
ege5 OF the Priests were amazingly increased in
some of the groups, and the office even became
as IN Hawaii, yet in the earlier DAYS
ot their residence in the Pacific, when the Gus
.oms OF the mother-country should have been
strongest upon them, the Priests, so far from con-
.tltutlng a hereditary Caste of their own, were
merely the younger members of the Chiefs fam
~, who had been trained to the office and in
general were merely delegates or representatives
It the sacrifices or public religious rites. And
when the Doctor intimates that the Tui-Tonga of
~ fAlSHulJ IoidHuS WIS a SORT OF sovereign
'%ontiff, the head of the Priesthood, he is Singh
misled by his authorities or incorrectly in
ormed by others. rr.
When Doctor Lang attempts to prove the ma
ional and race-identity of the Polynesians and
he Malays from the similarity Of the language,
e certainly travels the path that more illustrious
zen than himself have trodden before him, but,
ot having sufficient knowledge of the Polyne-
ian language to form an independent judgment
t his own, he errs where they erred, a matter
in them at their time, and also per- /
APPS in the Doctors first edition in 1884, but not {
, when publishing it in 1877. Though there ,
re many words similar in the Malay and Polyne- 1
than Crawfurd seems to have been |
ware of,-yet that that similarity is owing to t
lood and race-identity, and because the Polyne- i
an is a scion more or less corrupted of the
Iaiays, has never yet been proven, but remains !
this day, as it was in Marsden's time, an as 9
Such similarity may be produced by
inquest, commerce, or by colonisation, and it is
lite, nav. more Orohahle that tho ,yords oo- &