Such evidence as a comparison of languages thus far supplies, lends more countenance to the idea of migration through the islands of the Pacific, than to such a route from the Mediterranean as is implied in any significance attached to the legend of Atlantis. As to the Behring Strait route, present ethnology and philology point rather to an overflow of Arctic American population into Asia. Gallatin was the first to draw attention to certain analogies in the structure of Polynesian and American languages, as deserving of investigation; and pointed out the peculiar mode of expressing the tense, mood, and voice of the verb, by affixed particles, and the value given to place over time, as indicated in the predominant locative verbal form. Such are to be looked for with greater probability among the languages of South America; but the substitution of affixed particles for inflections, especially in expressing the direction of action in relation to the speaker, is common to the Polynesian and the Oregon languages, and has analogies in the Cherokee. The distinction between the inclusive and exclusive pronoun _we_, according as it means “you and I,” or “they and I,” etc., is as characteristic of the Maori as of the Ojibway. Other observations of more recent date have still further tended to countenance the recognition of elements common to the languages of Polynesia and America; and so to point to migration by the Pacific to the western continent. But this idea of a migration through the islands of the Pacific receives curious confirmation from another source. In an ingenious paper on “The Origin of Primitive Money,”[1] originally read at the meeting of the British Association at Montreal in 1884, Mr. Horatio Hale shows that there is good reason for believing that the most ancient currency in China consisted of disks and slips of tortoise shell. The fact is stated in the great Chinese encyclopædia of the Emperor Kang-he, who reigned in the early years of the eighteenth century; and the Chinese annalists assert that metal coins have been in use from the time of Fuh-he, about B.C. 2950. Without attempting to determine the specific accuracy of Chinese chronology, it is sufficient to note here that the most ancient form of Chinese copper cash is the disk, perforated with a square hole, so as to admit of the coins being strung together. This, which corresponds in form to the large perforated shell-disks, or native currency of the Indians of California, and with specimens recovered from ancient mounds, Mr. Hale regards as the later imitation in metal of the original Chinese shell money. A similar shell-currency, as he shows, is in use among many islanders of the Pacific; and he traces it from the Loo-Choo Islands, across the vast archipelago, through many island groups, to California; and then overland, with the aid of numerous disclosures from ancient mounds, to the Atlantic coast, where the