A Naturalist Among the Head-Hunters; Being an Account of Three Visits to the Solomon Islands in the Years 1886, 1887, and 1888 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ... canoes is only what one might expect. Certainly a native that was pointed out to me on Ulawa as having come adrift from one of the islands of the Santa Cruz group showed considerably more of the Polynesian than of the Melanesian type. Coming to the New Hebrides, where the population is almost entirely Melanesian, canoes are conspicuous by their absence, such as are seen being the most wretched affairs, and totally unfitted for any extended voyage. II. UPON THE MIGRATIONS OF THE POLYNESIAN RACE. It may not be here out of place to offer a few remarks upon the migrations of the Polynesian race, which from Tonga and Samoa as a starting-point, as is almost universally admitted, has sent forth colonists that have peopled New Zealand, Tahiti, and the surrounding islands, the Marquesas, and the distant Sandwich Islands, as well as all the scattered groups of coral atols south of the equator, and between the Marquesas on the east and the Solomons on the west. How are we to account for their presence in the Pacific? It is undoubtedly to Asia, that cradle of the human race, and after that to the Malay Archipelago, that we must look for the beginnings not only of the Polynesian, but of the Melanesian race as well. A comparison of the vocabularies in Wallace's "Malay Archipelago" with those of the Melanesian and Polynesian inhabitants of the Pacific will show a close bond of relationship. The theory of Dumont d'Urville, that Polynesia formed part of a large continent formerly connected with Asia, which by some geological convulsion was buried beneath the waves, the tops of the mountains alone remaining above water and forming to-day the islands of the South Sea, cannot now be seriously entertained. The latest knowledge we possess on this point tends...