ster Island in the East. This is shown by the close physical and moral
resemblance between their inhabitants, as well as by the facts that they
all speak dialects of the same language, and have the same manners and
customs, the same general system of tabus, and similar traditions and
religious rites.

The evidence of both language and physical traits tends to show that
their remote ancestors came from the East Indian Archipelago, and that
they were still more distantly related to the pre-Arian races of
Hindostan.

It is also proved by concurrent traditions of the different groups that
there was a general movement of population throughout central Polynesia
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Christian Era, during
which the Harvey Islands and afterwards New Zealand were colonized, and
many voyages were made between the Hawaiian Islands and the Samoan and
Society groups. This intercourse, however, seems to have ceased for four
or five hundred years before the arrival of Captain Cook.

ARTS AND MANUFACTURES.

The ancient Hawaiians were not savages, in the proper sense of the term,
but barbarians of a promising type. When we consider that they occupied
the most isolated position in the world, and that they were destitute of
metals and of beasts of burden, as well as of the cereal grains, cotton,
flax and wool, we must admit that they had made a creditable degree of
progress towards civilization. Like the other Polynesians, they had not
invented the art of making pottery, or the use of the loom for weaving.

Their cutting tools were made of stone, sharks' teeth or bamboo. Their
axes were made of hard, fine grained lava, chiefly found on the mountain
summits. Their principal implement for cultivating the soil was simply a
stick of hard wood, either pointed or shaped into a flat blade at the
end. With these rude tools they cut and framed the timbers for their
houses, which were oblong with long sides and steep roofs, and were
thatched with _pili_ grass, ferns or _hala_ leaves. In the building as
well as in the management of canoes they were unsurpassed. For
containers they used a large gourd (_cucurbita maxima_, which was not
found elsewhere in the Pacific), and also cut out circular dishes of
wood as truly as if they had been turned in a lathe.

For clothing they beat out the inner bark of the paper mulberry and of
some other trees, until it resembled thick flexible paper, when it was
called _kapa_ or _t