Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/370

62 imitated from the Bible or suggested by ancient precedents, I do not know. Anyhow they are manufactured freely to explain the names of localities and grafted into the legend of the Flood and the Dispersion; one has been devised for the island of Moala. The name of that island is not Fijian, but Polynesian; the myth-maker, therefore, corrects it to Muala, asserting that it was changed to Moala by the Tongans who overspread that part at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He tells how one party of those who were dispersed at the flood went searching for a new home and sighted some islands. "Which shall we steer for?" they asked their chief. "Ki mua la," "Bowwards ho!" he answered; hence that island was named Muala. The philologist will reject this etymology at sight; besides the name of Moala is found in the distant island of Rotuma under circumstances that suggest that the name existed in that form long before the Tongans invaded Fiji. We who are trained in the comparative method, who have the patience, the time, and the funds to prosecute research over large areas have discovered that part of Fiji was Polynesian before it was Fijian, and Ave can explain the form Moala as a relique of the Polynesian occupation; but the author of this episode was ignorant of the fact; he thought of the islands as vacant until his people settled there; he had to explain the Polynesian form of the name, so he explained it in the only way open to him, as a recent Tongan corruption. Restoring what he took to be the original form of the word he analysed just as a modern philologist might do, only without his training; this analysis and the example of other stories suggested to him the little episode I have related. In the same way Mr. Leaf, unacquainted with the worship of divine kings, can make no sense of an "immortal draught," and concludes that this is a false derivation; he then traces the word ambrosia