tation, which he believes to
mark the old route from Hawaii to the islands to the southeast.
According to Hawaiian tradition, which is by no means historically
accurate, what is called the second migration period to Hawaii seems to
have occurred between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries (dated from
the arrival of the high priest Paao at Kohala, Hawaii, 18 generations
before Kamehameha); to have come from the southeast; to have introduced
a sacerdotal system whose priesthood, symbols, and temple structure
persisted up to the time of the abandoning of the old faith in 1819.
Compare Alexander's History, ch. III; Malo, pp. 25, 323; Lesson, II,
160-169.]

[Footnote 5: _Kahiki_, in Hawaiian chants, is the term used to designate
a "foreign land" in general and does not refer especially to the island
of Tahiti in the Society Group.]

[Footnote 6: Lesson, II, 152.]

[Footnote 7: Ibid., 170.]

[Footnote 8: Ibid., 178.]

2. POLYNESIAN COSMOGONY

In theme the body of Polynesian folk tale is not unlike that of other
primitive and story-loving people. It includes primitive
philosophy--stories of cosmogony and of heroes who shaped the earth;
primitive annals--migration stories, tales of culture heroes, of
conquest and overrule. There is primitive romances--tales of
competition, of vengeance, and of love; primitive wit--of drolls and
tricksters; and primitive fear in tales of spirits and the power of
ghosts. These divisions are not individual to Polynesia; they belong to
universal delight; but the form each takes is shaped and determined by
the background, either of real life or of life among the gods, familiar
to the Polynesian mind.

The conception of the heavens is purely objective, corresponding, in
fact, to Anaxagoras's sketch of the universe. Earth is a plain, walled
about far as the horizon, where, according to Hawaiian expression, rise
the confines of Kahiki, _Kukulu o Kahiki_.[1] From this point the
heavens are superimposed one upon the other like cones, in number
varying in different groups from 8 to 14; below lies the underworld,
sometimes divided into two or three worlds ruled by deified ancestors
and inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or even by the gods[2]--the
whole inclosed from chaos like an egg in a shell.[3] Ordinarily the gods
seem to be conceived as inhabiting the heavens. As in other mythologies,
heaven and the life the gods live there are merely a reproduction or
copy of earth and its ways.