"Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind: His soul proud science never taught to stray Far as the Solar Walk or Milky Way. Yet simple Nature to his hope has given Behind the cloud-capt hill an humbler heaven; Some safer world in depths of woods embraced, Some happier island in the watery waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold."[2] The cradle of the Polynesian race was undoubtedly Asia; and to arrive at a clear understanding as to how it became transported from a continental home into this island world it will be necessary to carry the mind back probably more than 200,000 years. At that time the dominating section of the human family was the Caucasian--fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and revelling in the glory of long, wavy hair. Their civilisation, however, like their weapons of chipped stone, was of the most primitive character; but they had advanced sufficiently in the ascending scale of human progress to show that they valued life by paying pious respect to their dead. They preserved the memory of the departed by erecting over their burial-places huge blocks of stone, many of which monuments stand to-day to mark the course of their migrations. And, except possibly a flint axe-head or a rude ornament found deep in some ancient gravel-bed, these megalithic monuments are amongst the most convincing evidence we have of the wide diffusion of the human race in prehistoric times. From the most westerly point in Ireland, across the European and Asiatic continents, they stretch by the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in the former, and the plains of Siberia in the latter, until they reach the waters of the Pacific. Even this wide expanse of ocean proved no insuperable barrier to the onward march of wandering man; for it is by the presence of his stone-building habit in so many of the Pacific Islands that we are able to construct a probable hypothesis of the process by which Polynesia first became inhabited.