mercantile speculation; from the rapidly-extending connexion between several of the groups of these islands and the colony of New South Wales; and from the progress that was then making in the colonization of the southernmost of the Polynesian groups-the islands of New Zealand-by adventurers from that colony.

In pursuing this investigation, I had little else to refer to than the result of my own previous reading and observations, in the shape of a variety of unconnected notanda; some of which were extracts of works which I had previously read, while others were merely the details of facts relatiye to the South Sea Islands, of which I had at different periods been incidentally apprised during my residence in New South Wales. But extremely limited as were the sources of information to which I could possibly have access in a ship's cabin at sea, there was sufficient light derivable from these sources to show that the subject of inquiry was interesting and important to a degree I could never have anticipated; and that it promised in some measure to open up the

darkest and the most mysterious portion of the ancient history of man.

A multitude of other avocations of a very different kind prevented me from taking up the subject again till some time after my arrival in London in the month of November, 1833, after a third voyage to England from New South Wales. In the course of that voyage I had drawn up, with a view to publication in London, An, Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, ́ both as a Penal Settlement and as a British Colony; and on subsequently revising the manuscript of that work for the press, it was my intention to have subjoined to it, as a sort of Appendix, the paper I had written on a former voyage, On the Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation. But the latter paper being more of a literary character than the work I refer to, and being therefore addressed chiefly to a different class of readers, I was induced to publish it, with such additions as I could afford leisure to make,* in

* Several of these additions were suggested by the perusal of a work recently published, containing an Essay "On the Polynesian

the midst of a variety of uncongenial and harassing employments, in a separate form. It would have given me much pleasure to have had it in my power to spend a few days in the library of the British Museum, to collect facts and illustrations bearing on the subject of investigation in the following pages, from works that are not elsewhere obtainable. But, unfortunately, the only time I have been able to devote to literary labour for several years past, has been the time I have passed on ship-board—either amid storms

or East Insular Languages," by W. Marsden, Esq., author of the History of Sumatra and of the Malay Dictionary. I had not seen that work till the following treatise had gone to press ; but it was fortunately not too late to make a few remarks on some of the facts it adduces, and on some of the reasonings of its intelligent author. If I have been induced to dissent entirely from the latter, as well as from those of other writers of note, on the origin of the Polynesian nation, I trust the reader will find I have not done so without sufficient grounds. At all events, the series of facts from which I have been led to deduce inferences of a most important bearing on the history and condition of man, in the ages immediately succeeding the deluge, is open to examination; and if those, who may consider it going far out of the way to go to Mexico and Otaheite for information relative to the pyramids of Egypt and the ancient monuments of Etruria, will explain these facts satisfactorily on any other hypothesis, I shall be most willling to confess with the dramatist, operam perdidi et oleum.

and icebergs in the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere, or beneath vertical suns within the tropics, where the only books to be had, in addition to the few odd volumes in the corner of one's own trunk, are the stars of heaven by night, or the flying-fish and the dolphin by day. But although I am quite sensible of the very imperfect state in which the following publication is about to issue from the press, I was unwilling to carry out the manuscript a second time to New South Wales:-1st, Because the interesting investigation it appears to me to have opened up, may be pursued by others who have opportunities for literary research, from which I am altogether precluded; and 2nd, Because I flatter myself it will enable the reader to answer to his own entire satisfaction a question which has hitherto remained unanswered since the days of Columbus, . and to answer that question, moreover, in a way that will serve materially to strengthen his faith in the oracles of God.

London, May, 1834.