Page:Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, New York, 1860.djvu/238

 208 FIJI AND THE FIJIANS. and sixteen for " to strike." One other illustration of the copiousness of the language is worth mention. The Greek and other cultivated tongues have different words for " to wash," according as the operation has reference to the body, or to clothes and the like ; and, where the body is spoken of, their synonyms will sometimes define the limb or part which is the subject of the action. The Fijian leaves these lan- guages far behind ; for it can avail itself of separate terms to express the washing process, according as it may happen to affect the head, face, hands, feet, and body of an individual, or his apparel, his dishes, or his floor. Fijian literature is in its cradle, but its infancy gives promise of a vigorous and energetic manhood. The New Testament and other parts of Scripture are printed in the language, and the Missionaries have pub- lished some useful books besides. These last, as the case of the people has affectingly required, have been, as yet, taken up for the most part with religious and moral subjects. As soon as possible, elementary works on Various branches of general knowledge will be supplied for the use of the Mission schools. In the year 1850, two literary productions of great merit issued from the Wesleyan Mission press at Viwa : the one a Grammar of the language, the other a Fijian-English and English-Fijian Dictionary, both by the late laborious and excellent Missionary — who did so much towards preparing the way for the forthcoming Fijian translatipn of the Old Testament, — the Eev. Da^ad Hazlewood. This is a name which ought not to die. Mr. Hazlewood's predecessors and contemporaries had studied the language ; they had represented it by an alphabet, which all philologists will confess to be at once appropriate, simple, and scien- tific ; they had collected vocabularies, and lists of phrases and idioms ; they had printed numerous translations and original compositions in Fijian; they had provided themselves with manuscript illustrations of its system of sounds, of its general structure, and of its leading peculiar- ities : it was reserved for him to draw up and publish the first Grammar and Dictionary of the language properly so called. Mr. Hazlewood's Grammar is a book upon which the Bopps and Grimms of Germany will lo^k with respect, for its philosophical accuracy and completeness, at the same time that they eagerly drink up its precious philology. In point of simplicity, comprehensiveness, and scholarly handling of its subject, it is a worthy associate of a Grammar of the Kafir tongue, which a Wesleyan Missionary in South Africa, the Rev. John W. Appleyard, published in the same year, and which is one of the most valuable contributions to linguistic science, that the world has re-