Religious rites and social customs outlast both physical type and language; but even were it otherwise, there is great resemblance in build and feature between the Polynesians and many of the “Red-Indian” tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are described by the early navigators not as tall, grave, hooked-nose men, but as copper colored, pleasant looking, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander than to the Delaware or Cherokee. In reaching South America, there were no distances to be overcome such as to present insurmountable difficulties to the Malays. Their canoes have frequently, within the years that we have had our missionary stations in the islands, made involuntary voyages of six or seven hundred miles. A Western editor has said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for discovering America, as it is so large that he could not well have missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that the chances must have been thousands to one against its being reached by canoes sailing even from the nearest land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter Island was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove canoes to Easter Island would have driven them from the island to Chili and Peru. The Polynesian Malays would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms, by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war time, whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful conqueror who had dined: this occurs, however, only when the market is already surfeited with human joints. In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met strong westerly winds before we had gone half way across the seas, and, south of the trade-wind region, these blow constantly to within a short distance of the American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of the Chilian current. A canoe blown off from the southern islands, and running steadily before the wind, would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito. When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he was, perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was “The Indies” that he had found--an India peopled by the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered of all the nations of the world, but one which the English seem destined to supplant. The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, emigrants from the winterless climate of the Malay peninsula and Polynesian archipelago; and, although the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited them not ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented the spread of the bands they planted there. At all times it has been remarked by ethnologists and acclimatizers that it is easier by far to carry men and beasts from the poles toward the tropics than from the tropics to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to New Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature‘s laws, and their descendants are paying the penalty in extinction. CHAPTER IV. PAREWANUI PAH.