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from the other, they are in fact independent and original versions of a once common legend, or series of legends, held alike by Cushite, Semite, Turanian, and Aryan, up to a certain time, when the divergencies of national life and other causes brought other subjects peculiar to each other prominently in the foreground; and that as these divergencies hardened into system and creed, that grand old heirloom of a common past became overlaid and colored by the peculiar social and religious atmosphere through which it has passed up to the surface of the present time. But besides this general reason for refusing to adopt the Israelitish theory, that the Polynesian legends were introduced by fugitive or emigrant Hebrews from the subverted kingdoms of Israel or Judah, there is the more special reason to be added that the organization and splendor of Solomon's empire, his temple, and his wisdom became proverbial among the nations of the East subsequent to his time; on all these, the Polynesian legends are absolutely silent." In commenting on the legend of _Hiiaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele_, Judge Fornander says: "If the Hebrew legend of Joshua or a Cushite version give rise to it, it only brings down the community of legends a little later in time. And so would the legend of _Naulu-a-Mahea_,... unless the legend of Jonah, with which it corresponds in a measure, as well as the previous legend of Joshua and the sun, were Hebrew anachronisms compiled and adapted in later times from long antecedent materials, of which the Polynesian references are but broken and distorted echoes, bits of legendary mosaics, displaced from their original surroundings and made to fit with later associations." In regard to the account of the Creation, he remarks that "the Hebrew legend infers that the god Elohim existed contemporaneously with and apart from the chaos. The Hawaiian legend makes the three great gods, Kane, Ku, and Lono, evolve themselves out of chaos.... The order of creation, according to Hawaiian folk-lore, was that after Heaven and earth had been separated, and the ocean had been stocked with its animals, the stars were created, then the moon, then the sun." Alluding to the fact that the account in Genesis is truer to nature, Judge Fornander nevertheless propounds the inquiry whether this fact may not "indicate that the Hebrew text is a later emendation of an older but once common tradition"? Highest antiquity is claimed for Hawaiian trad
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