A JAPANESE LEAVE-TAKING.

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exact place indicated in his instructions,-that his voice shrank up to a piping treble, and he had to conclude his speech in a suffocating whisper. So contagious is deep feeling, that all the suite were affected in the same manner and at the same moment, and could only whisper their adieux, interrupted by their sighs. And so they departed.

CHAPTER V.

DERIVATIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN RACE-TRADITIONS OF.

FEW

EW persons, probably, who walk in Greenwich Park, realize to themselves, as they pass Flamsteed House, that they have stepped from one hemisphere of the globe into another. Yet the meridian of zero is of great geographical importance; and the line which bisects the earth longitudinally gives us the definite idea of an eastern and a western world. Great Britain is contained in the western hemisphere; for the convenience of which statement, we overlook the kingdom of Kent, the Eastern Counties, etc., which lie eastward of this imaginary line. And since the western world is our world, the Hawaiian Islands claim to have a geographical kindred with us, for they, too, are situated in the western hemisphere.

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From the east or from the west the population of those islands has been derived; the only other solution of the question of origin being that of Centres of Creation,' a hypothesis which finds favour in the United States. We do not enter upon this theory; but seek in personal similitude, in analogies of language and institutions and in cherished traditions, to identify the Hawaiians with one of the divisional races of men, and to trace the steps across the ocean by which they arrived in this small archipelago.

The inquiry assumes larger proportions when we find

DERIVATION OF THE HAWAIIANS.

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that it involves the derivation of the red inhabitants of the American Continent, between whom and the Pacific islanders there are points of resemblance.

Stephens came to the conclusion, moreover, that there was a unity of race throughout the continents of America, and that the present Indian nomads represent the old city-builders of Yucatan and Central America. A fact supporting this view may be noticed here. Stephens relates that in removing some of the large flat stones that faced buildings, there was frequently found on the plaster beneath, the impression of a small outspread hand. When Catlin exhibited his Indian Museum in London, some years ago, there was to be seen on the buffalo leather, of which the tents were formed, the print of a small outspread hand, which had been dipped in red pigment and pressed upon the leather. Thus this sort of crowning imprimatur on the plaster of the ancient buildings and on the tents of the living race, the size and the attitude of the hand being similar, may go for a small but ancillary proof of identity between the past and present inhabitants of America; who, nevertheless, need not be strictly its autochthones, but may have arrived on the continent by an ancient immigration. The points of resemblance mentioned by Ellis between the aborigines of the mainland and of the Pacific Islands, are 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.'

There seems also some resemblance traceable in the building of parallel walls, which have been found in Hawaii as well as in Central America. Whilst the