Mr. Mariner and Dr. Martin may perhaps be able to arrange the words properly, correct the inaccuracies, and translate it. This writer also, who was well skilled in music, describes in a lively manner their concerts, in which music is combined with dancing.* They have drums of hollowed wood, about four feet long and one and a half in diameter, each of which is beaten upon by three or four men with sticks; their other instrument is a hollow piece of bamboo, with which they keep time by striking one end against the ground, the orchestra is surrounded by a ring of men singers, while the women sing and dance in a circle round all. They generally begin with a single voice in a slow and solemn style, the women marching softly round; this is soon accompanied by an instrument, the other voices and instruments gradually joining till they arrive at the loudest pitch. They then begin by degrees to quicken their time both in music and dancing to the quickest possible. Sometimes in the middle of their career a full stop is made, and the most profound silence observed for about a minute, when out they set again most furiously. In some of their pieces they practise the diminuendo in the same degrees of gradation, both with respect to time and noise. The whole is full and musical, mostly in the minor key or flat third, but in so uncommon a style, that I could never get hold of more than a dozen following notes. Their organs and flutes have very little variety, and are never used in their concerts.'

Of all the inhabitants of Polynesia whom Captain Burney had seen, he gives the preference decidedly to the Tonga islanders; a

Keonemar, keonemar, koar, koar, koar,

Keo vahey, keo vahey, kobey, kohey, kohey,

To allelelay
Ki allubey.

There is a dance in the Romaunt of the Rose, which both in character and costume bears a striking resemblance to one which Captain Cook describes :

Full fetis damosellis two,

Righte young and full of semely hede,
In kirtels and none othir wede,
And faire ytressed every tresse,
Had Mirthe ydoen for his noblesse
Amid the carole for to daunce;
But hereof lieth no remembraunce
Howe that ther daunsed queintely,
That one would come all privily
Ayen that othre, and when thei ware
Together almoste, thei threwe ifere
Their mouthis so, that thro their plaie
It seemed as ther kist alwaie :

To dauncen well couthe ther the gise;
What should I more to you devise?
Ne bode I never thinnis go

Whiles that I sawe hem dauncin so. v. 776.

great deal is now known of three other groups, the Society Islands, the Sandwich, and the Marquesas; and though we have no information concerning either, which can be compared in fullness and interest to Mr. Mariner's, enough has been obtained to prove the justness of his opinion. The women are much less immodest than in the other islands, and maternal affection exists as strongly in them, as among those nations where the instincts of nature are fostered and strengthened by the sense of duty. This is because, in ordinary times, the women are treated with respect and tenderness, and are therefore, perhaps generally, as strongly attached to their husbands as the wives in Europe. The natives of Fiji, Hamoa, and the Sandwich Islands, who were at Tonga, used to censure the men for suffering the women to lead such easy lives, saying that they ought to work hard, and till the ground, war being sufficient occupation for men. But the Tongans replied that women ought to do such things only as were womenly, and became the tenderness of the sex; the stronger body should perform the harder work. It is, however, to be feared that as the Fiji customs acquire prevalence, and habitual wars are brutalizing their manners, in this point, as in others, they may be rapidly degenerating towards a savage state.

The deference which is paid to the Fiji people, who are the most ferocious of all the Polynesian nations, is not founded wholly upon their celebrity for war. The Tonga islanders go to study surgery among their neighbours, and some tremendous operations are described which they perform with success. In all cases of wounds they are very apprehensive of tetanus, and never permit the patient to wash himself, nor cut his hair, nor his nails, till he is tolerably well recovered, unless the wound is such that it can first be laid completely open. They notice that wounds in the extremities, and more particularly in the feet and hands, are liable to produce this tremendous affection; that any alarm, or sudden noise, will bring it on; and they positively assert that the mere sensation occasioned by cutting the hair or nails has not unfrequently had the same dreadful effect. It occurs very commonly in the Tonga, but still more frequently in the Fiji, where a singular mode of treatment has been invented. The practitioner passes a reed wetted with saliva into the urethra, so as to occasion a considerable irritation and discharge of blood; if the general spasm be very violent, a double thread is looped over the end of the reed, and when the reed is felt in the perinæum, they cut down upon it, seize the thread, and withdrawing then the reed make a seton of the passage, the two ends of the thread hanging from the orifice in the urethra, and the double part from the artificial opening; and they draw it occasionally

occasionally backward and forward, which excites very great pain, and a copious discharge of blood. Mr. Mariner has seen the operation performed; about three or four persons in ten are said to be recovered by the treatment; the Fiji islanders speak of the success as more certain. The same operation is resorted to for wounds in the abdomen, upon a mistaken notion that any extravasated blood in the cavity of the abdomen may thus be carried off through the urethra.

Circumcision is practised here a fact which bears forcibly against the hypothesis that Polynesia has been originally peopled from America, as Zuñiga attempts to shew. He argues that these islands must have received their first inhabitants from the east, because in the torrid zone the east wind generally prevails, and by that wind Indians from the Palaos are frequently driven to the Philippines; whereas it is not known that any of the Philippine Indians have ever by any accident been drifted to the eastward islands. This writer also thinks that he has discovered some words both in Chili and Patagonia, agreeing with the Tagala, one of the Philippine languages;-the specimens which he has given are very far from establishing this opinion: but he thinks himself authorized to affirm that the Philippines as well as Polynesia were peopled from Chili and Peru. A fact of more importance than any which he has advanced in favour of this most improbable story, is noticed by Captain Burney:-a fermented beverage, similar in its mode of preparation to the Cava of the South Sea Islands, is made by the natives of Chili, and by them called Cawau ;-the same preparation with the same name is found on the opposite coast of South America, among the Tupi tribes in Brazil.

This is undoubtedly a remarkable fact; but it is the only one which might appear to indicate any connection between the Polynesian and American tribes. In no other custom, as far as our reading (which happens to have been directed particularly to that subject) cau enable us to judge, is there any resemblance; the superstitions and their national character are totally different; nor is the physical character less so: these two divisions of the world seem to have been peopled by different races. Nor has any thing resembling the Aztec or Toltec antiquities been found in Polynesia. What Zuñiga says of the prevalent winds would bear with great force against a supposition that those islands have been peopled by a succession of accidents; but this supposition is highly improbable, though even a far longer time were allowed for it than has elapsed since the Deluge. Admitting, however,--what we verily believe to be even absurdly improbable,--that in the course of four thousand years so many accidents should have happened as to have peopled all the groups and single islands which lie scattered at

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such wide intervals, from the Indian archipelagos to the * Sandwiches, or to Easter Island; in that case a much greater difference than actually exists would be found in their customs, superstitions, and especially in their relative state of civilization. For it is not imaginable that the chance company of a canoe, driven out to sea, and cast upon a distant island, should carry with them many of the arts of their country, or the means of perpetuating them.-There is decisive proof of a Malay origin, or rather of a common origin with the Malays, in all the Polynesian vocabularies. Even in Madagascar, Captain Burney shows that the numerals are manifestly cognate with those in Sumatra and in Cocos Island. According to our judgment, the South Sea Islands must have been settled as colonies by some forgotten people in the East, who were either so far civilized as to colonize for the purposes of commerce, or had perhaps attained that higher state in which colonization is pursued without any views of mercantile gain, as necessary for the health and security of the state. The character of their priestcraft, the sacred language which exists in some of these islands, the Tooitonga of the Tonga islands, and the allegorical mythology, indicate much less than the unequivocal testimony of their dialects, a relation to the East,-the land of allegory and of priestcraft.

The accounts which Captain Burney has collected with such diligence from every accessible source, in all languages, show that the Polynesians when they were first discovered by the Spaniards two centuries ago, were much in the same state as when they were visited by Captain Cook. A lamentable change has taken place since our establishment in New Holland, and since the American and our own whalers have frequented their sea. They have acquired the arms, the vices, and the diseases of Europe in addition to their native stock. But on the other hand, there seems a reasonable assurance that civilization and Christianity have actually taken root in the Society islands. Those missionaries to whose unweariable zeal and admirable perseverance we bore a willing and a grateful testimony when they were insulted by those who sat in the chair of the scorner, are now reaping the fruits of their long labours. They have a school in the island of Eimeo, which is attended by persons of all ages; they have printed Spelling-books, Catechisms, and the New Testament-history in the language of the country, and were printing the Old Testament part of the scrip

In Zuñiga's History of the Philippines, the islands of San Duisk are frequently mentioned, and the translator has not discovered the curious blunder. The Spanish author or his printer has fallen into the unhappy mistake of supposing that San must have the same meaning in Sandwich as in Santiago, and have thus created Lord Sandwich a Saint:-a metamorphose quite as extraordinary as that of St. Vitus into a pagan idol.

tural

tural history-their press is at Botany Bay. Many places of idolatrous worship have been destroyed, and some of the priests have literally committed their idols to the flames. The king appears to be a sincere convert. He says in one of his letters-Jehovah himself, He it is that causeth the growth of his own word; for that reason it prospers, it grows exceedingly.' If the work should proceed here as happily as it has begun, and Christianity with all its accompanying blessings be established firmly in a single island, the converted islanders will soon become objects of envy and imitation. Meantime, as the Missionary Societies extend their views, we hope the Tonga Islands will not be overlooked. A translation of the Gospels might be accomplished in this country, by means of these volumes, with Mr. Mariner's aid, and the Missionaries would thus be spared whole years of painful labour.

ART. II.-Dissertation prefixed to the Supplemental Volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica, exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Moral and Political Philosophy in Europe, from the Revival of Letters. By Dugald Stewart, F. R. S. &c.

WE

E entertain sentiments of unaffected esteem for the writings of Mr. Stewart, and have taken more than one opportunity of expressing it; nevertheless, as we are aware that our approbation is burthened with more conditions than his professed disciples will probably allow to be reasonable, of course we shall not be disappointed to find, that the justice which we are willing to render him should appear, to many of our readers, somewhat penurious. But those who have studied the science to which he has devoted himself, in other writings as well as in his, will we trust acquit us of any wilful partiality. We cheerfully acknowledge the many amiable qualities discernible in every thing that he has written: Quis enim neget illum bonum virum et comem et humanum fuisse?De ingenio ejus in hisce disputationibus, non de moribus, quæritur; our difference with him is upon matters of opinion; not because we are prepossessed in favour of the tenets of any other writer, but for reasons, the validity of which our readers have an opportunity of judging.

His writings are evidently the production of a superior man, whose taste has been cultivated by much and various reading; and they have served to embellish the dry department of knowledge which he has taken under his protection, with graces of which metaphysics had never before been thought susceptible. We are

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far