In this preliminary excursion into the wilderness of Hawaiian literature we have covered but a small part of the field; we have reached no definite boundaries; followed no stream to its fountain head; gained no high point of vantage, from which to survey the whole. It was indeed outside the purpose of this book to make a delimitation of the whole field of Hawaiian literature and to mark out its relations to the formulated thoughts of the world. Certain provisional conclusions, however, are clearly indicated: that this unwritten speech-literature is but a peninsula, a semidetached, outlying division of the Polynesian, with which it has much in common, the whole running back through the same lines of ancestry to the people of Asia. There still lurk in the subliminal consciousness of the race, as it were, vague memories of things that long ago passed from sight and knowledge. Such, for instance, was the _mo’o_; a word that to the Hawaiian meant a nondescript reptile, which his imagination vaguely pictured, sometimes as a dragonlike monster belching fire like a chimera of mythology, or swimming the ocean like a sea-serpent, or multiplied into a manifold pestilential swarm infesting the wilderness, conceived of as gifted with superhuman powers and always as the malignant foe of mankind. Now the only Hawaiian representatives of the reptilian class were two species of harmless lizards, so that it is not conceivable that the Hawaiian notion of a mo’o was derived from objects present in his island home. The word _mo’o_ may have been a coinage of the Hawaiian speechcenter, but the thing it stood for must have been an actual existence, like the python and cobra of India, or the pterodactyl of a past geologic period. May we not think of it as an ancestral memory, an impress, of Asiatic sights and experiences?