"Polynesian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remains of the cave-bear, hyena, and rhinoceros, is, with one exception, the most ape-like human relic yet found. Yet its cranial capacity is far above that of the highest apes, and is assimilated with that of Hottentot and Polynesian skulls. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... the family. We have learnt that in some of the dialects of modern Sanskrit, in Bengali for instance,[4] the plural is formed, as it is in Chinese, Mongolian, Turkish, Finnish, Burmese, and Siamese, also in the Dravidian and Malayo-Polynesian dialects, by adding a word expressive of plurality, and then appending again the terminations of the singular. We have learnt from French how a future, je parlerai, can be formed by an auxiliary verb: "Ito speak have" coming to mean, Ishall speak. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... period. The Negritos are, no doubt, quite a distinct race from the Malay; but yet, as some of them inhabit a portion of the continent, and others the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, they must be considered to have had, in all probability, an Asiatic rather than a Polynesian origin. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... ride up to the top of one of their buildings on the steam-elevators which some of them employ. Think how these men of iron are changing the surface of the earth, spiking rails to the prairie in distant territories, or sending into Polynesian archipelagoes the rivet on whose integrity depends the safety of the iron ship. How needful to human progress is the conscientious perfection of their work! What tact they must employ in dealing with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... of life. This latter conclusion is directly opposed to that arrived at by Villerme, from the statistics of the height of the conscripts in different parts of France. When we compare the differences in stature between the Polynesian chiefs and the lower orders within the same islands, or between the inhabitants of the fertile volcanic and low barren coral islands of the same ocean (18. For the Polynesians, see Prichard's 'Physical History of Mankind,' ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... sisters with a description of what she called her "newly instituted Polynesian Academy;" returned, and set to work to guide the rough, coarse hand through ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... for the first time it really came home to Frida's mind that Bertram Ingledew, standing there before her, regarded in very truth the Polynesian chief and Sir Lionel Longden as much about the same sort of unreasoning people—savages to be argued with and cajoled if possible; but if not, then to be treated with calm firmness and force, as an English officer on an exploring expedition might treat a wrathful Central ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... spring in the South Seas when, for the first time, I went ashore at Batengo, which is the Polynesian village, and the only one on the big grass island of the same name. There is a cable station just up the beach from the village, and a good-natured young chap named Graves had charge of it. He was an upstanding, clean-cut fellow, as the fact that he had been among the islands for three ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... shining shadow through the isles and seas till he made his last home at Samoa. It was a three years' cruise among "summer isles of Eden." Perhaps no book of Stevenson's is less popular than his narrative of storm and calm, of beachcombers and brown Polynesian princes. The scenery is too exotic for the general taste. The joy and sorrow of Stevenson was to find a society "in much the same convulsionary and transitional state" as the Highlands and Islands after 1745. He was always haunted, and in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were separated by a thin and precarious interval from the savage. Scratch a civilized Russian, they say, and you find a wild Tartar. Scratch an ancient Greek, and you hit, no doubt, on a very primitive and formidable being, somewhere between a Viking and a Polynesian. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... money or popular approval, but for my own pleasure. There was a Work upon which I spent only special hours of delicious leisure and infinite labor. It held all that was forbidden to popular compositions; depth and sorrow and dissonances dearer than harmony. I called it a Symphony Polynesian, and I had spent years in study of barbaric music, instruments and kindred things that this love-child of mine might be more richly clothed by a tone or a fancy. Aunt Caroline had interrupted, this morning, at a very point of achievement toward which I had been working through the usual alternations ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... merrily enough at that work), or tell her she was, spiritually, in a parlous case. So the Fairy Queen and all her court had long since fled from England, and long ago made a home in the undiscovered isles of the South. Now they all met and mingled in the throng of the Polynesian fairy folk, and, rushing down into the waters, they revelled all night on the silvery sand, in the windless dancing places of the deep. Tane and Tawhiti came, the Gods of the tides and the shores, and all ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... flank movement, as it were, I am lost. Uncle passed over my blunder without a smile and went on to say many remarkable things, if sound means anything. However, trust even a deaf woman to prick up her ears when a compliment is headed her way, whether it is in Sanskrit or Polynesian. In acknowledgment I stuck to my flag, and the man's command of quaint but correct English convinced me that I would have to specialize in something more than first thought if I was to cope ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... upon the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her, and embraced her and loved her. Shorter than Bella was Martha, a trifle, but the merest trifle, less queenly of port; but beautifully and generously proportioned, mellowed rather than dismantled by years, her Polynesian chiefess figure eloquent and glorious under the satisfying lines of a half-fitting, grandly sweeping, black-silk holoku trimmed with black lace more ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... and faced him. "Why not, Lewes; why not?" he asked, with a kindly smile. "Think of the gap which separates your intellectual powers from those of a Polynesian savage. Why, after all, should it be impossible that this child's powers should equally transcend our own? A freak, if you will, an abnormality, a curious effect of nature's, like the ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... how an analogous change might come about in the existing world. There is, at present, a great difference between the fauna of the Polynesian Islands and that of the west coast of America. The animals which are leaving their spoils in the deposits now forming in these localities are widely different. Hence, if a gradual shifting of the deep sea, which at present bars migration between ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... in the Assyrian Court of the British Museum, reading and thinking over a little book upon the feminist movement the tired woman had made her buy. She got a bun and some cocoa in the little refreshment-room, and then wandered through the galleries up-stairs, crowded with Polynesian idols and Polynesian dancing-garments, and all the simple immodest accessories to life in Polynesia, to a seat among the mummies. She was trying to bring her problems to a head, and her mind insisted upon being ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... these peculiar stone ruins remain as evidence of the existence of an ancient people of superior intelligence to the islanders of to-day. As to the meaning or use of these structures we are entirely in the dark. The natives of these groups know nothing concerning them, and the Polynesian builder in that dark past was too busy clubbing and eating his neighbour to write histories. Scientists are in doubt, as in the case of the great ruins at Metalanim, whether they were built as sacrificial altars or as monuments to ambitious chiefs, ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... analytically and accurately. A thing may be universally known among us, and yet never get itself so much as mentioned. Around scores of elementary platitudes there hangs a shuddering silence as complete as that which hedges in the sacred name of a Polynesian chief. At every election time, in our large cities, most of the fundamental issues are concealed, particularly when they happen to take on a theological colour, which is very often. It is, for example, the timorous public theory, born ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... any reason to be amazed at or despise the other. Baelz quotes Mrs. Bishop, who after spending twenty years traveling in the East said, "I know now that one can be naked, yet behave like a lady." The above story of the crippled Aino girl gives credibility to Becke's story[1499] of a Polynesian woman, wife of a European, who died after child bearing rather than submit to treatment by a physician which would be attended by ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... natives here are much darker than are those at Kerepunu; most of them suffer from a very offensive-looking skin disease, which causes the skin to peel off in scales. In their conversation with one another I recognized several Polynesian words. The water is obtained by digging in the ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... through my sleep "Come up and be alive," I'd answer—No, unless you'll keep The glass at sixty-five. I might be willing if allowed To wear old Adam's rig, And mix amongst the city crowd Like Polynesian "nig". ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... SAM SMITH wants to know more about Polynesian Labour Traffic. The NOBLE BARON who has charge of Colonial affairs in Commons, whilst controverting all his statements, says "everyone must admit that the Hon. Member has spoken from his heart." "Which," NOVAR says, "it reminds me of the couplet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... is a traditional Polynesian economy in which more than 90% of the land is communally owned. Economic activity is strongly linked to the US, with which American Samoa conducts the great bulk of its foreign trade. Tuna fishing and tuna processing ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... a word of Fontenelle's to which I should not gladly subscribe; there is no advice of his which I have not tried to follow in all my attempts to explain the myths of India and Greece by an occasional reference to Polynesian ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... surprise, enough of the words were familiar to enable me clearly to catch the meaning of the whole. They were Polynesian, the Polynesian of the Samoans which is its most ancient form, but in some indefinable way—archaic. Later I was to know that the tongue bore the same relation to the Polynesian of today as does not that of Chaucer, but of the Venerable Bede, to modern English. Nor was this to be so astonishing, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... only a quarter of an hour with the girl, but this gave him time to take the measure of it. After he had spoken to her about her bereavement, very much as an especially mild missionary might have spoken to a beautiful Polynesian, he let her know that he had learned from her companions the very strong step she was about to take. This led to their spending together ten minutes which, to her mind, threw more light on his character than anything that had ever passed between them. She had always felt with ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... volume of Judge Fornander's elaborate work on "The Polynesian Race" he has given some old Hawaiian legends which closely resemble the Old Testament history. How shall we account ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... eyeballs of O'Hara, bulging from out circular trenches round their sockets, surveyed Hogarth, weighing, divining him, while his bottom lip, massive as the mouth of Polynesian ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... to these, prevail down to now, on the Mariana, the Philippine and the Polynesian islands; according to Waitz, also among several African tribes. Another custom, prevalent till late on the Balearic islands, and indicative of the right of all men to a woman, was that, on the wedding night, the male kin had access to the bride in order of seniority. The bridegroom came ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... powerful influence. They have been found in tribes in the Status of savagery, in the Lower, in the Middle, and in the Upper Status of barbarism on different continents, and in full vitality in the Grecian and Latin tribes after civilization had commenced. Every family of mankind, except the Polynesian, seems to have come under the gentile organization, and to have been indebted to it for preservation and for the means of progress. It finds its only parallel in length of duration in systems of consanguinity, which, springing up at a still ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... Victor": 'Maui' — In Polynesian mythology, the great hero who attempted to overcome Death, which could only be done by passing through Hine-nui-te-po (Great Woman of Night). This Maui attempted to do while she slept. Awakened, however, by the cry of a black fantail, she ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the skin with patterns, is Polynesian. The military tattoo is Dutch. It was earlier tap-to, and was the signal for closing the "taps," or taverns. The first recorded occurrence of the word is in Colonel Hutchinson's orders to the garrison of Nottingham, the original of which hangs ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... we are strictly logical on the point of the euphony of language, the Italian dialect, which we deem so soft and liquid, sounds quite harsh, I'm told, in comparison with the labial syllables that the Polynesian islanders use in ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... devour them; planets assimilate their own moons. All is a ravening that never ends but to recommence. And unto whomsoever thinks about these matters, the story of a divine universe, made and ruled by paternal love, sounds less persuasive than the Polynesian tale that the souls of the dead are devoured ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... guise in all succeeding history. It is the permanent element in the shifting fate of races. Islands show certain fundamental points of agreement which can be distinguished in the economic, ethnic and historical development of England, Japan, Melanesian Fiji, Polynesian New Zealand, and pre-historic Crete. The great belt of deserts and steppes extending across the Old World gives us a vast territory of rare historical uniformity. From time immemorial they have borne and bred tribes of wandering herdsmen; they have sent out the invading ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... other respects become mixed, and a number of intermediate varieties have thence resulted. From the existence of two races in New Zealand the conclusion might be drawn that the darker were the original proprietors of the soil anterior to the arrival of a stock of true Polynesian origin, that they were conquered by the latter and nearly exterminated. There is a district in the northern island, situated between Taupo and Hawke's Bay, called Urewera, consisting of steep and barren hills. The scattered ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... are the result of a fusion of three elements: (1) the Polynesian, (2) the Malay-Bisya, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... nations—the Teutonic, Slav, and Latin peoples. Sitting yet in darkness, and massed against us, crouch sullenly the immemorial hordes of Asia, the wild blacks of the African swamps and jungles, and the dwellers of Polynesian seas. Occident and Orient, the world's battalions are forming for new encounters and new dismays. Never since the strong-limbed Goths changed the face of Europe has there been a period of such tense anticipation, nor ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... of the Ti plant (Diacaena terminalis) are cultivated in the Polynesian islands. There is, however, but one which is considered farinaceous and edible. In Java the root is considered ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the subjection of Herakles to Eurystheus, to the anger of Poseidon at Odysseus, or to the curse laid upon the Wandering Jew. The barbaric mind has worked at the same problem; but the explanations which it has given are more childlike and more grotesque. A Polynesian myth tells how the Sun used to race through the sky so fast that men could not get enough daylight to hunt game for their subsistence. By and by an inventive genius, named Maui, conceived the idea of catching ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... gentle breezes and favouring winds gradually wore off the panic occasioned by the supernatural appearance; and, if not forgotten, it was referred to either in jest or with indifference, he now had run through the straits of Malacca, and entered the Polynesian archipelago. Philip's orders were to refresh and call for instructions at the small island of Boton, then in possession of the Dutch. They arrived there in safety, and after remaining two days, again sailed ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... publication of his book on Texas he returned to the United States and at St. Louis, in 1840, he joined a party crossing to Oregon. From that Territory he went to the Sandwich Islands and for some years wandered among the islands of the Polynesian Archipelago, returning to California in time to join General Fremont in the latter's attempt to free California from Mexican rule. After the Gadsden Purchase he moved to Arizona, where, after years of occupation ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... never do enough for him; for domestic servants, who adored him; for the English policeman even, on whom he often tried, quite in vain, to pass himself as one of the criminal classes; for the shepherd, the street arab, or the tramp, the common seaman, the beach-comber, or the Polynesian high-chief. Even in the imposed silence and restraint of extreme sickness the power and attraction of the man made themselves felt, and there seemed to be more vitality and fire of the spirit in him as he lay exhausted and speechless in bed than in an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is unknown, are dependent upon memory for such records as they have of their past; and sometimes a professional class arises to preserve and repeat the stories believed to embody these records. Among the Maories and their Polynesian kinsmen the priests are the great depositaries of tradition. It is principally from them that Mr. White and the Rev. W. W. Gill have obtained their collections. But the orators and chiefs are also fully conversant with ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveler, furnished with a canoe and starting from the south, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America. On pp. 592-3 of "Isis," vol. I., the Thevetatas—the evil, mischievous gods that have survived in the Etruscan Pantheon—are mentioned, along with the "sons of God" ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... purple plain Of Polynesian main, Where never yet adventurer's prore Lay rocking near its coral shore: A tropic mystery, which the enamored deep Folds, as a beauty in a charmed sleep. There lofty palms, of some imperial line, That never bled their nimble wine, Crowd all the hills, and out the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... possession of by Captain Zenas Bent, April 15th, 1862, and proclaimed Hawaiian territory in the reign of Kamehameha IV., as per "By Authority" notice in the "Polynesian" ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... years later there were only 90 survivors out of a total population of 1200. They subsequently decreased still further. Their language was allied to that of the Maoris of New Zealand, but they differed somewhat from them in physique, and they were probably a cross between an immigrating Polynesian group and a lower indigenous Melanesian stock. The population of the islands includes about 200 whites of various races and the same number of natives (chiefly Maoris). Cattle and sheep are bred, and a trade is carried on in them with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... of the Polynesian dialects sufficient to make himself in some degree understood by the natives of the new island. Under the guidance of the chief he had made a first journey of exploration, and had seen for himself that the place was a marvel of natural beauty and fertility. The one barren spot ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... is a living God, different altogether from that Triune God and nearer to the heart of man. The spirit of this book is like that of a missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and smash some Polynesian divinity of shark's teeth and painted wood and mother-of-pearl. To the writer such elaborations as "begotten of the Father before all worlds" are no better than intellectual shark's teeth and oyster shells. His purpose, like the purpose of that missionary, ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the warning of a senior combat commander to the effect that the deployment of black depot units to the Polynesian areas of the Pacific should be avoided. The Polynesians, he explained, were delightful people, and their "primitively romantic" women shared their intimate favors with one and all. Mixture with the white race had produced "a very high-class half-caste," mixture with the Chinese a "very ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... to her knees was blue-black and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency that gives to woman's hair its charm. Oh, there were no kinks in it, any more than were there kinks in the hair of her entire genealogy. For she was Polynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... of Cape Horn, in lat. 56 deg. 25' S., is the Diego Ramirez group of small, rocky islands, the most southern possession of the republic. Its westernmost possessions are Sala-y-Gomez and Easter islands, the former in about 27 deg. S., 105 deg. W., and the latter, the easternmost inhabited Polynesian island, in 27 deg. 6' S., 109 deg. 17' W. Much nearer the Chilean coast (396 m.), lying between the 33rd and 34th parallels, are the three islands of the Juan Fernandez group, and rising apparently from the same submerged plateau about 500 m. farther north of the latter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... in religious ritual has been obscured by our modern use of it in a hygienic or ethical sense. In reality it is but an illustration of the principle of 'taboo,' and 'taboo' may extend to anything, good or bad, useful or useless, hygienically clean or unclean. The primary meaning of 'taboo,' a Polynesian word, is something that is set aside or forbidden. The field covered by this word among savage and semi-savage races is, as Robertson Smith points out, "very wide, for there is no part of life in which the savage does not feel himself surrounded by mysterious agencies and recognise ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... blue-eyed man who had been refused passage to my destination. Probably, that American in the toga and sandals, exiled from the island he loved so well, had a message for the Tahitians or others of the Polynesian tribes of the South Seas; Essenism, maybe, or something to do with virginal beards and long hair, or sandals and the simple life. I wished ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Archipelago, Ellis (Consult, on this and other points, the "Polynesian Researches," by the Rev. W. Ellis, an admirable work, full of curious information.) states, that the reefs generally lie at the distance of from one to one and a half miles, and, occasionally, even at more than three miles, from the shore. The central ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... his approach the natives squatted down, as a mark of respect: a custom similar to which prevails in several of the Polynesian islands. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... almost entirely confined to the North Island, and, although it was then gradually dying out, numbered about 30,000. They are of fine physique, tall and robust, and are said to belong to the Polynesian type, probably having come over from the Fiji Islands, or some of the Pacific group, ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... Islands, but business grew too slack for even a whaleman's patience. Eleven months out from Whitby, and, if my memory fails me not, less than a score of full barrels in our hold! So the Captain made up his mind to try south, and working our way across the Equator, we struck in amongst the Polynesian groups, raising the Southern Cross higher and higher, till we were somewhere about latitude 30 deg., and longitude 175 ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... and favouring winds gradually wore off the panic occasioned by the supernatural appearance, and if not forgotten, it was referred to either in jest or with indifference. They now had run through the Straits of Malacca, and entered the Polynesian Archipelago. Philip's orders were to refresh and call for instructions at the small island of Boton, then in possession of the Dutch. They arrived there in safety, and after remaining two days, again ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... clusters, which, at pretty nearly uniform distances from the main, sentinel, at long intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America. In a peculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American character of country. Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not one partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas or Gallipagos, the isles of St. Felix and St. Ambrose, the isles Juan-Fernandez and Massafuero. Of the first, it needs not here to speak. The second lie a little above the Southern ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Letia, smelling the gaudy label on the tin of salmon in the anticipative ecstasy of a true Polynesian, "PE SE MEA FA'AGOTOIMOANA (like a thing buried deep in ocean). May God send me a white man as generous as thee—a whole tin of SAMANI for nothing! Now do I know that Nalia will bear ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... moon "an imaginary being, the subject of perhaps one of the most ancient, as well as one of the most popular, superstitions of the world." [8] And as we must explore the vestiges of antiquity, Asiatic and European, African and American, and even Polynesian, we bespeak patient forbearance and attention. One little particular we may partly clear up at once, though it will meet us again in another connection. It will serve as a sidelight to our legendary scenes. In English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek, the moon is feminine; ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... bore north-west to investigate the second clue, and in the Union Group he made his first important discovery of new land—Nukunono, inhabited by a branch of the Micronesian race, crossed with Polynesian blood. From thence he ran southward to Samoa, where he came upon traces of the massacre of La Perouse's second in command, M. de Langle, in the shape of accoutrements cut from the uniforms of the French officers. Consistent with his usual concentration upon the object ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... area of the Pacific now covered by the Polynesian Archipelago, as having been, at some former time, occupied by large islands, or, may be, by a great continent, with the ordinarily diversified surface of plain, and hill, and mountain chain. The shores of this great land were doubtless fringed by coral reefs; and, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... called Jupiter by accident, than the Polynesian Maui, the Samoyede Num, or the Chinese Tien.(42) If we can discover the original meaning of these names, we have reached the first ground of their later growth. I do not say that, if we can explain the first purpose ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... of a familiar character in New Zealand, chief Mete Kingi, who recently died at the age of one hundred years. He was a fine specimen of the Maori race, the native New Zealanders, a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian family. The New Zealanders surpassed all other people in the art of tattooing, to which their chiefs gave especial attention. Mete Kingi, as our picture shows, was no exception. Tattooing on the face they termed moko. The men tattoo their faces, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... considerable field for research, and some puzzling problems are presented. While Madagascar may be correctly termed "the great African island" as regards its geographical position, considered ethnologically, it is rather a Malayo-Polynesian island. Though so near Africa, it has but slight connection with the continent; the customs, traditions, language, and mental and physical characteristics of its people all tend to show that their ancestors came across the Indian Ocean from the south-east of Asia. There are traces of some ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... pounds. His hair was kinky and negroid, and he was black. He was peculiarly black. He was neither blue-black nor purple-black, but plum-black. His name was Mauki, and he was the son of a chief. He had three tambos. Tambo is Melanesian for taboo, and is first cousin to that Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were as follows: First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he must never eat clams nor any food from a fire in which clams had been cooked; thirdly, he must ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... dunes. These were taken behind a rock sheltered from the wind from the sea. Tartlet then chose two very dry pieces, with the intention of gradually obtaining sufficient heat by rubbing them vigorously and continuously together. What simple Polynesian savages commonly did, why should not the professor, so much their superior in his own ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... others of our Polynesian Converts behindhand. The Native Churches in Mangaia have also given generous gifts, of which the Rev. ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... body with its red face munching out monosyllables, lived a recluse. "Too much living has driven him from life," Dorn thought, "and killed his lusts. So he sits and reads books—the last debauchery: strange, twisted phrases like idols, like totem poles, like Polynesian masks. He sits contemplating them as he once sat drunkenly watching the obscenities of black, white, and yellow bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of life, for the grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes in him from bestiality to asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bacchanal ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... to the aborigines by the modern Malays—to whom reference will be made later on—is Dyak, and they are divided into numerous tribes, speaking very different dialects of the Malayo-Polynesian stock, and known by distinctive names, the origin of which is generally obscure, at least in British North Borneo, where these names are not, as a rule, derived from those of the rivers ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... from Asia, led to settlements, but they remained unknown ever afterward to all save the settlers themselves, while those from Europe led to settlements that were either soon abandoned or otherwise came to nought. Wandering Tatar, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, or Polynesian sailors who drifted, intentionally or accidentally, to the Pacific coast in some unrecorded and prehistoric past, and from whom the men we call our aborigines probably are descended, sent back to Asia no tidings of what they had found. Their discovery, in so ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... Polynesian Rata-myth there is a very instructive series of manifestations of the dragon.[312] The first form assumed by the monster in this story was a gaping shell-fish of enormous size; then it appeared as a mighty octopus; and lastly, as a whale, into whose jaws the hero ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... diet. For many weeks before I came, they said, no man had gone fishing. There were so few natives that the trees supplied them all with enough to eat, and the melancholy Marquesan preferred to sit and meditate upon his paepae rather than to fish, except when appetite demanded it. There is a Polynesian word that means "hungry for fish," and to-day it is only when this word rises to their tongues or thoughts that they go eagerly to the sea or to the tooth-like base of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... the boundless ocean, out of sight of land, the stars only as our guides, and the sagacity of the Polynesian chief and his followers to depend on. What made us feel most strange was our utter ignorance where we were going. From the quantity of provisions and water the natives had thought it necessary to provide, it was ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the group, over all of which Raa Kook is king, although the cluster of islands to the south is restive and occasionally in revolt. These natives with whom I live are Polynesian, I know, because their hair is straight and black. Their skin is a sun-warm golden-brown. Their speech, which I speak uncommonly easy, is round and rich and musical, possessing a paucity of consonants, being composed principally ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... prevented her from showing the weakness she felt. Instead, it roused her vanity and made her choose to sit down, so disguising perceptibly the disparity of height which gave Kitty an advantage over her and made the Young Doctor like some menacing Polynesian god. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the Polynesian Solomon has long since been deserted. Its thousand rafters of habiscus have decayed, and fallen to the ground; and now, the stream murmurs over them ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the leisure class is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the class distinctions nor the distinctions between leisure-class occupations are so minute and intricate. The Polynesian islanders generally show this stage of the development in good form, with the exception that, owing to the absence of large game, hunting does not hold the usual place of honour in their scheme of life. The Icelandic community in the time of the Sagas also affords a fair instance. In such a ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Pearce, the young British sailor, lying between the thwarts with the long shaft of an arrow in his chest, and a young Norfolk Islander with an arrow under his left eye. The arrows flew around them in clouds, and suddenly Fisher Young—the nineteen-year-old Polynesian whom he loved as a son—who was pulling stroke, gave a faint scream. He was shot ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... late times, the population problem comes to the front in a very visible shape. Nor is it less plainly manifest in the everlasting agrarian questions of ancient Rome than in the Arreoi societies of the Polynesian Islands. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... almost an identity, between the religious institutions of most of the Polynesian islands; [Footnote: Polynesian Islands: in the Pacific, just east of Australia.] and in all exists the mysterious "Taboo," restricted in its uses to a greater or less extent. So strange and complex in its arrangements is this remarkable ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... spoken in all the states of the Peninsula, in Sumatra, Sunda, Java, Borneo, Celebes, Flores, Timor, and Timor Laut, the Moluccas, and the Philippines. Traces of it are found among the numerous Polynesian dialects, and in the language of the islanders of Formosa. Siam proper has a large Malay population, descendants mainly of captives taken in war, and the language is therefore in use there in places; it is found also here and there on ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... Polynesian servant on board, whose services he had engaged at the Society Islands. Unlike his countrymen, Wooloo was of a sedate, earnest, and philosophic temperament. Having never been outside of the tropics before, he found many phenomena off Cape Horn, which absorbed his attention, and set him, like other ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... rough-and-tumble. And I feel certain that the story itself is to blame, and neither the scenery nor the persons, being one of those who had as lief Mr. Stevenson spake of the South Seas as of the Hebrides, so that he speak and I listen. Let it be granted that the Polynesian names are a trifle hard to distinguish at first—they are easier than Russian by many degrees—yet the difficulty vanishes as you read the Song of Rahero, or the Footnote to History. And if it comes to ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... trickery the sincerest feelings. Amid many faulty and clumsy works Van Gogh has also left some really beautiful canvases." Before Gauguin went to Tahiti his Breton peasants were almost as monstrous as his later Polynesian types. His representations of trees also seem monstrous. His endeavour was to get beyond the other side of good and evil in art and create a new synthesis, and thus it came to pass that the ugly and the formless reign oft in his work—the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... matters of curiosity as may interest minds neither parochial nor doggedly antiquarian. Parish registers among the civilised peoples of antiquity do not greatly concern us. It seems certain that many Polynesian races have managed to record (in verse, or by some rude marks) the genealogies of their chiefs through many hundreds of years. These oral registers are accepted as fairly truthful by some students, yet we must remember ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... the fine sandy beach extending round it for a considerable distance. Along the shore we saw no canoes, but a number of natives appeared, waving green branches—emblems of peace. As we watched them through our telescopes, we saw that they were of the Polynesian, or brown race—fine-looking fellows, unlike the Papuans, who inhabit the islands we were about to visit. As it was not likely that they could supply us with either cocoanut oil or sandal-wood, we did not communicate with them, but continued ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... out, and here is another party of madmen with tubes,—yes, and with cooking-stoves and lumber, too. Then comes the crowning, stupendous, and unspeakable event. The whole sun is hidden and the heavens are lighted up with pearly streamers! In the name of all the Polynesian gods, what is the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various |
