"Polynesian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the Pacific she met a young Polynesian of high birth who gravely told her, when asked about his proposed career in life, that he had not yet decided whether to enter the Church or to join a Circus. He was still sufficiently near to the large ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... incantation. We can form some idea of the practical results of such a system from what we know of the manners and social condition of those Turanian races in Asiatic Russia who profess what is called chamanism, and from the condition of most of the negro tribes and Polynesian islanders. Among all these people, who still remain in a mental condition from which the rest of the species has long escaped, we find the highest places occupied by priest-magicians. Now and then popular fury makes them pay cruelly for the ill-success of their ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... student of the phenomenon, a recognized authority on its ethnological interpretation, says of it: "To illustrate the continuity of culture and the identity of the elementary human ideas in all ages, it is sufficient to point to the ease with which the Polynesian word tabu has passed ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... imagine how an analogous change might come about in the existing world. There is, at present, a great difference between the fauna of the Polynesian Islands and that of the west coast of America. The animals which are leaving their spoils in the deposits now forming in these localities are widely different. Hence, if a gradual shifting of the deep sea, which at present bars migration between the easternmost of these islands ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... natives of Madagascar.—These are not Africans to the same extent as the Kaffres of the coast. As far back as the time of Reland it was known that the affinities of the Malagasi language were with the Malay and Polynesian tongues of Asia; but it was also known that the similarity in physiognomy was less than that of language. Hence came a conflict of difficulties. The speech indicated one origin, the colour another—whilst the fact ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... year that he was persuaded to write down and publish certain curious experiences at Constantinople, in "Aziyade," a book which, like so many of Loti's, seems half a romance, half an autobiography. He proceeded to the South Seas, and, on leaving Tahiti, published the Polynesian idyl, originally called "Raharu," which was reprinted as "Le Mariage de Loti" (1880), and which first introduced to the wider public an author of remarkable originality and charm. Loti now became extremely prolific, and in a succession of volumes chronicled old exotic memories or manipulated ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... three uninhabited clusters, which, at pretty nearly uniform distances from the main, sentinel, at long intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America. In a peculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American character of country. Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not one partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas or Gallipagos, the isles of St. Felix and St. Ambrose, the isles Juan-Fernandez and Massafuero. Of the first, it needs not here ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... at the human inhabitants of the island there is also a considerable field for research, and some puzzling problems are presented. While Madagascar may be correctly termed "the great African island" as regards its geographical position, considered ethnologically, it is rather a Malayo-Polynesian island. Though so near Africa, it has but slight connection with the continent; the customs, traditions, language, and mental and physical characteristics of its people all tend to show that their ancestors came across ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... amount of ethnographic data derived from the Polynesian Islands, Micronesian Islands, Australia, etc., more than one-half of this important volume is devoted to philology, a large share relating to the tribes ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Neither has any reason to be amazed at or despise the other. Baelz quotes Mrs. Bishop, who after spending twenty years traveling in the East said, "I know now that one can be naked, yet behave like a lady." The above story of the crippled Aino girl gives credibility to Becke's story[1499] of a Polynesian woman, wife of a European, who died after child bearing rather than submit to treatment by a physician which would be attended by exposure ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... (closely related to Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages), English 2.9%, Tongan 2.4%, other Pacific islander 2.1%, other 2% note: most people are bilingual ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... and working with the heathen around home. And Julia always went to the old East Church, too; and they had believed just the same things, the same election, and predestination and damnation and all; at one time they had thought of going out missionaries together to the Polynesian Island, but that had been before Julia took Captain Cairnes for better or worse, principally worse, and before she herself undertook all she could in converting Dr. Maybury,—a perfect Penelope's web of a work; for Dr. Maybury died as he had lived, holding ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... that the Maories came in the first instance, some thirteen hundred years ago, from the Sandwich Islands. There is reason for believing this to be correct, when one reflects that the beautiful Polynesian race peopled all the archipelago sprinkled ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... man over carefully, but rapidly. "But you're not Oriental—or at least, not much. You look Polynesian to me." ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... The best is the Gracilaria spinosa. Agal-agal derives its name from Tanjong Agal on the north coast of Borneo; where it was originally collected. It is now found in great abundance throughout the Polynesian Islands, Mauritius, &c. It is soluble, and forms a clear jelly—used by consumptive patients. It fetches a high price in China. It is supposed that the sea-swallow derives his materials for the edible bird's nests at Borneo from ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Christian era, all facts testify. If they are not older as a people, than most of the present nations on the Asiatic shores of the Indian ocean, as has been suggested, they are certainly anterior in age, to the various groups of the Polynesian islands. They have, it is apprehended, taken the impress of their character and mental ideocracy from the early tribes of Western Asia, which was originally peopled, to a great extent, by the descendants of Shem. ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... Malay; but yet, as some of them inhabit a portion of the continent, and others the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, they must be considered to have had, in all probability, an Asiatic rather than a Polynesian origin. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... confuse the minds of the heathen by the sight of variations among Christians, and thus never to preach in any place already occupied by Missions, a resolution from which he only once departed, in the case of a group apparently relinquished by its first teachers. This cut off all the properly called Polynesian isles, whose inhabitants are of the Malay type, and had been the objects of care to the London Mission, ever since the time of John Williams; also the Fiji Islands; and a few which had been taken in hand by a Scottish Presbyterian Mission; but the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the ground, recently daubed with turmeric and oil for this ceremony; he was styled the ariki, or chief, of this portion of the island. On an axe, as well as other presents, being laid before him, he (as is usual among the chiefs of the Polynesian Islands on a ceremonial occasion) did not show any expression of gratification or dislike at the presents but in a grave manner made a few inquiries about the ship. Near the ariki sat a female, whose blooming days had passed; she was introduced as his wife; her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... called Chams, had a certain amount of Indian culture and considered the classical name Champa as an elegant expression for the land of the Chams. Judging by their language these Chams belonged to the Malay-Polynesian group and their distribution along the littoral suggests that they were invaders from the sea like the Malay pirates from whom they themselves subsequently suffered. The earliest inscription in the Cham language dates from the beginning of the ninth century but it is preceded by a long ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... guilty. He managed his hunts systematically, placed them under the rigid control of a sort of guild known as "dog-soldiers," and allowed to be slain only what were needed for his wants. The buffalo was to him what the cocoa-palm is to the Polynesian; and more, for he needed warm shelter and warm clothing. He cared for it accordingly. It grew around him almost as the cocoa-grove around the hut of the islander. A herd will even now graze quietly for days in the neighborhood of an Indian village ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... portrait of a familiar character in New Zealand, chief Mete Kingi, who recently died at the age of one hundred years. He was a fine specimen of the Maori race, the native New Zealanders, a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian family. The New Zealanders surpassed all other people in the art of tattooing, to which their chiefs gave especial attention. Mete Kingi, as our picture shows, was no exception. Tattooing on the face they termed moko. The men tattoo their faces, hips, and thighs; the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... however, that we have before us remnants of four races: a short, dark, curly-haired and perhaps original race, a few varieties of the tall Melanesian race, arrived in the islands in several migrations, an old Polynesian element as a relic of its former migrations eastward, and a present Polynesian element from ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... enough of the words were familiar to enable me clearly to catch the meaning of the whole. They were Polynesian, the Polynesian of the Samoans which is its most ancient form, but in some indefinable way—archaic. Later I was to know that the tongue bore the same relation to the Polynesian of today as does not that of Chaucer, but of the Venerable Bede, to modern English. Nor was this to ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt |
