Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/84

72 highest civilization which they have obtained in Burma, Pegu, Siam, and Kamboja, are intimately connected with the Oceanic races. The tribes of the Niha-Polynesian family, who appear to have preceded those of the Malayan, resemble the finer type of the Mons, Burmans, and the allied Indian and Himalayan tribes. The Malayan family approximates closely to the ruder or more purely Mongolian type of Ultraindia. The identity in person and character (of the Niha-Polynesian) is accompanied by a close agreement in habits, customs, institutions and arts, so as to place beyond doubt, that the lank-haired population of the islands (Oceania) has been received from the Gangetic and Ultra-indian races. The influx of this population closed the long era of Papuan predominance and gave rise to the new or modified forms of language which now prevails. The ethnic distance between the Polynesians and the Javans or the Mons, and the mere language and geographical position of the former, attest the great antiquity of the period when the Ultraindian tribes began to settle in Indonesia."



Such in brief are J. R. Logan's ideas as to the ancient Gangetic-Polynesian race, and his remarks as to the admixture of races from very early times, seem to offer an explanation of many peculiarities that have been observed in the Polynesian race as we know it. The influence of the Ancient Egyptian and Semitic civilizations on the race during the period it occupied India are apparent at this day—not so much of the former, but more particularly of the Semitic—which would seem to indicate that the ethnic connection of the Semitic race was later in time and of longer duration. It has frequently been pointed out that the Egyptian sun-god Ra finds an equivalent in Polynesian in the name—Ra—for the sun;