Abraham Fornander has done inestimable service to future students of Oceanic ethnology by preserving for their use songs and traditions that would otherwise have passed into oblivion, but he will be used as a storehouse of data rather than as an exponent of history, and I feel that I am best serving his reputation by cutting away the false deductions that would have tainted the sound and wholesome facts which
form the larger portion of his work. I cannot leave him without wishing that he had made better use of Bancroft's saying, which he printed as his text on the title-page, "It is now a recognized principle in philosophy that no religious belief, however crude, nor any historical traditions, however absurd, can be held by the majority of a people for any considerable time as true, without having in the beginning some foundation in fact."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Polynesian Race, by A. Fornander, Vol. i, p. 193.
[2] We detect here a flavour of the commentator's superior education.
[3] A somewhat futile proceeding unless they were of wood.
[4] Distant land
[5] Fijian canoes are sculled with long oars worked perpendicularly in a rowlock formed by the cross-ties of the outrigger, or of the two hulls in a twin canoe. With powerful scullers a speed of three miles an hour is attained in a dead calm.
[6] The Polynesian Race, Its Origin and Migrations. London, 1880.
[7] The Polynesian Race, Its Origin and Migrations, Vol. i, p. 33.