In this connection, it will not, perhaps, lead us too far afield, to remark that in the Hawaiian speech we find the chisel-marks of Hindu and of Aryan scoring deep-graven. For instance, the Hawaiian, word _pali_, cliff or precipice, is the very word that Young-husband—following, no doubt, the native speech of the region, the Pamirs—applies to the mountain-walls that buttress off Tibet and the central plateaus of Asia from northern India. Again the Hawaiian word _mele_, which we have used so often in these chapters as to make it seem almost like a household word, corresponds in form, in sound, and in meaning to the Greek. [Greek: melos: [Page 261] ta melê], lyric poetry (Liddell and Scott). Again, take the Hawaiian word _i’a_, fish—Maori, _ika_; Malay, _ikan_; Java, _iwa_; Bouton, _ikani_ (Edward Tregear: The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary). Do not these words form a chain that links the Hawaiian form to the [Greek: ichthus] of classic Greece? The subject is fascinating, but it would soon lead us astray. These examples must suffice. If we can not give a full account of the tangled woodland of Hawaiian literature, it is something to be able to report on its fruits and the manner of men and beasts that dwelt therein. Are its fruits good for food, or does the land we have explored bring forth only poisonous reptiles and the deadly upas? Is it a land in which the very principles of art and of human nature are turned upside down? Its language the babble of Bander-log? This excursion into the jungle of Hawaiian literature should at least impress us with the oneness of humanity; that its roots and springs of action, and ours, draw their sustenance from one and the same primeval mold; that, however far back one may travel, he will never come to a point where he can say this is “common or unclean;” so that he may without defilement “kill and eat” of what the jungle provides. The wonder is that they in Hawaii of the centuries past, shut off by vast spaces of sea and land from our world, yet accomplished so much. Test the ancient Hawaiians by our own weights and measures. The result will not be to their discredit. In practical science, in domestic arts, in religion, in morals, in the raw material of literature, even in the finished article—though unwritten—the showing would not be such as to give the superior race cause for self-gratulation.