MAORI MIGRATIONS

Taranaki Daily News, 17 January 1921, Page 2

MAORI MIGRATIONS

STAKTED FROM EUROPE. PROFESSOR BROWS VIEWS. Professor J. Macmillan Brown, who has devoted many years of study and of investigation to the question of the origin of the Polynesians, is quite in accord with Sir A. Conan conviction that the Maoris arc of European descent. “Sir Conan Doyle is quite right, and Andrew Lang, who said Homer’s Greeks were people similar to the Maoris of the present day was quite right,” the Professor said. “It has been objected: But how did the Polynesians get from Europe to the Pacific? I don’t care how they got, but they got from Europe all right, as I can show and will show in the book on which I am at present working.” The Professor’s principal grounds for assigning European origin to the Polynesians is based on study of the languages of the Polynesian, and on comparison between those languages and Indo-European language. Though he has been engaged on the work for the past fifteen or sixteen years there still remains much to be done. Sir A. Conan Doyle, according to the cabled resume of the interview in Sydney, remarked, “You have only to look at the Maoris’ language to see that wherever you touch it you will find European words coming up.” Professor Macmillan Brown has gone into the subject more profoundly and more scientifically than our recent visitor professes to have done, but the conclusions arrived at by both are practically identical.