EASTER ISLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 95, 22 April 1922, Page 13

EASTER ISLAND.

.AN ETHNOLOGISTS' PUZZLE

Wy old friend, Professor MacMillan Awn, who by this time, I hope, has alised the dream of many years, and revelling among the colossal stone iues of Easter Island, is the best pupped investigator who has yet gone j that far-off map dot to nose out the rhence and the wherefore of those preiistoric puzzles," writes "J.C." in "Quick March." "His immediate predecessors, 4e Routledges, who cruised to Easter •land all the way from England in their ttle schooner-yacht the Mana, and who -educed a beautiful work on the sublet, laboured under the i disadvantage lack of acquaintance with the Poly-, man languages and lack of first-hand taowledge of Polynesian migrations.,An

tauirer into these matters is enor: handicapped unless he has;-'* •«p pre-knowledge of things Oceanic, 'rofessor Brown has a wide theoretical lowledge of Pacific languages, and*ix •onths, on lonely Rapanui will turn him tit a practical linguist.". ! ■% ■ "A most peculiar but little knojwn |et about Easter Island is that ■the

inguage of its brown people is exactly iat of our own Maoris. More than four ioußand miles of sea ecpnratps the two *ople, and the island groups between r ye variant dialects, but* away yonder l the westerly ocean more than lialfW to the coast of South America is a f ,ttle community" more like the Maori tongue than even that of Rarotonga. " (_e world may expect to hear more Vut this, and maybe will have the flystery of the «riant statues solved at l*t, when MacMUlan Brown turns up ) civilisation again with material for

Ib magnum opus. _ ' !"Ah American who visited Rapanni; A the eighties in the warship Mohi-j *n, and wrote a report embodying the ; Istory of the statues made the naive jatement that he had to prime the Ative pundits will with grof before fey became communicative on the snb_«t. Data extracted when the exJactee is halfseas over is scarcely the '"• aroit reliable of scientific material, and Ihope our. Prof, won't find the Mohican Ban's methods necessary.'' "*