"Polynesia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... approximation to the proportions of Sanskrit existing in some of the principal languages will show that the amount constantly diminishes as we recede from Java and Sumatra, until all vestiges of it disappear in the dialects of Polynesia. In the ordinary written language of Java the proportion is about 110 in 1000; in Malay, 50; in the Sunda of Java, 40; in the Bugis, the principal language of Celebes, 17; and in the Tagala, one of the principal languages of the Philippines, about ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... difficulties, but I am not sure that anyone after him until Hugh Lofting has really managed the trick; even in such a masterpiece as "The Wind in the Willows" we are not quite convinced. John Dolittle's friends are convincing because their creator never forces them to desert their own characteristics. Polynesia, for instance, is natural from first to last. She really does care about the Doctor but she cares as a bird would care, having always some place to which she is going when her business with her friends is over. And when Mr. Lofting invents fantastic animals he gives them a kind of credible ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... Polynesia, to Tahiti, almost to the end of the world, and he expected to be away four years. To me that seemed an almost endless absence, for it represented ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... previously termed "New Holland." The change of name was, I believe, introduced by the celebrated French geographer, Malte Brun, who, in his division of the globe, gave the appellation of Austral Asia and Polynesia to the new discovered lands in the southern ocean; in which division he meant to include the numerous insular groups scattered ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Islands." In consequence of these and similar interrogatories, which are not altogether unreasonable, considering the imperfect teaching of physical geography, the extent of this planet, the multitude of its productions, and the enormous number of islands composing Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, it is necessary to preface the following letters with as many preliminary statements as shall serve to make ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... derivable from Romanesque, Byzantine, or Oriental ornament. It is indigenous, if not to Ireland, at least to those prehistoric Aryan tribes of which the Irish were a branch. Its basis is the art of weaving, and in some respects resembles the matting of Polynesia much more closely that the vine-stems of Sicily or the arabesques of Byzantium. Spirals occur that bewilder the eye, yet are so faultlessly perfect that only the magnifying-glass brings out the incredible accuracy of the drawing. Among ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... Polynesia's busiest corner. Our ship's company. A patriotic celebration rudely interrupted. In the grip of the elements. Necessary repairs. A night vigil. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... Egypt, Syria, and some of the adjacent countries, for its esculent roots. A species is cultivated in the Deccan, for the sake of the leaves, which form a substitute for spinach. Farina is obtained from the root of Arum Rumphii in Polynesia. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... introduced by Logan to designate the light-colored non-Malay inhabitants of the Eastern Archipelago, is now used as a convenient collective name for all the peoples of Malaysia and Polynesia who are neither Malays nor Papuans but of Caucasic type. * * * Doctor Hamy, who first gave this extension to the term Indonesian, points out that the Battaks and other pre-Malay peoples of Malaysia so closely resemble the Eastern Polynesians, that the two groups ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... expeditions it has been shown that the same geological formation exists in South America as in the Antarctic plateau. On perusing this book, the reader will be struck by the wonderful resemblance between the Indians of South America, the Malay races of Asia, and the tribes of Polynesia. I maintain that they not only resemble each other, but are actually the same people in different stages of development, and naturally influenced to a certain extent by climatic and other local conditions. Those people did not come there, as has been supposed, ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... great friends, and both made themselves very useful on board. It was singular that they should have joined us much in the same way. Tamaku was likely to prove of service in acting as interpreter with the natives of Polynesia; for the language of the Sandwich group differs but slightly from the dialects of the other brown-skinned races inhabiting the numerous archipelagoes which dot its surface. The Sandwich Islanders can thus generally make themselves understood ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... one that I particularly over-estimated. The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though hard to speak with elegance. And they are extremely similar, so that a person who has a tincture of one or two may risk, not without hope, an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and pained me so acutely, that I half suspected I had been bitten by some venomous reptile, the congenial inhabitant of the chasm from which we had lately emerged. I may here remark by the way—what I subsequently gleamed—that all the islands of Polynesia enjoy the reputation, in common with the Hibernian isle, of being free from the presence of any vipers; though whether Saint Patrick ever visited them, is a question I ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... wrote the ballad. He found a medicine-man who hypnotized him from behind his back, which nobody at home had been able to do before his face. He exchanged stories with the clansmen—Scots for Polynesian; they were much the same in character and incident. He had found, in Polynesia, the way out of our own present. He met a Polynesian Queen—a Mary Stuart or a Helen of Troy grown old. "She had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war"; a "Queen of Cannibals, tattooed from head to foot." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that the man in the moon should be alone; therefore creative imagination has supplied him with a companion. The woman in the moon as a myth does not obtain to any extent in Europe; she is to be found chiefly in Polynesia, and among the native races of North America. The Middle Kingdom furnishes the following allusion: "The universal legend of the man in the moon takes in China a form that is at least as interesting as the ruder legends of more barbarous people. The 'Goddess of the Palace of the ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Within me is the longest day, the sun wheels in slanting rings, it does not set for months, Stretch'd in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above the horizon and sinks again, Within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests, volcanoes, groups, Malaysia, Polynesia, and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... earth. They mainly consisted of gigantic shrubs, which are either not represented by any existing types, or are akin to kinds which are now only found in small and lowly forms. That these forests grew upon a Polynesia, or multitude of small islands, is considered probable, from similar vegetation being now found in such situations within the tropics. With regard to the circumstances under which the masses of vegetable matter were transformed into successive coal strata, geologists ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... Section of the British Association, said that if one tried to recall what anthropology was in 1847, and then considered what it was now, its progress seemed most marvelous. These last fifty years had been an age of discovery in Africa, Central Asia, America, Polynesia, and Australia, such as could hardly be matched in any previous century. But what seemed to him even more important than the mere increase of material was the new spirit in which anthropology had been studied during the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... current which sets up the two southern routes. One of these is from the southwest of Kyushu via the Goto Islands to southeastern China; the other is from the south of Kyushu via the Ryukyu Islands, Formosa, and the Philippines to Malaysia and Polynesia. It has also been proved geologically* that the islands now forming Japan must at one time have been a part of the Asiatic continent. Evidently these various avenues may have given access to immigrants from Siberia, from China, from Malaysia, and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... required him to traverse the globe, but who was recalled by the government of General Cavaignac, has returned to Paris, having been absent several years. He will soon publish the narrative of his travels, which have been in Oceanica, Polynesia, Brazil, Patagonia, Chili, Bolivia, Peru, Equador, New Grenada, Jamaica, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Cote d Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Europa Island Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern and Gabon Gambia Gaza Strip Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Glorioso Islands Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guernsey Guinea Guinea Guyana Haiti Heard Island and McDonald Islands Holy See Honduras Hong Kong ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of, yet impossible to dislike, or despise—unless by the despicable. He delighted in stories of adventure, of bravery by flood or field, and might have posed—had he ever posed at all—as something of an authority on North Pole expeditions and the geography of Polynesia. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the incidents are uncommon or uncommonly ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... at last landed, he felt as though he were in Central Africa or Polynesia, as the inhabitants wore no clothes, and were bronzed like Ethiopians. He was much horrified at their misery and savage condition. Their dwellings he describes as dens without chimneys, and their food in many parts consisted of a horrible ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the alternate motion must have been produced directly by hand before being effected by cords. This simpler process is still in use in Tasmania, Australia, Polynesia, Kamtschatka, Thibet, Mexico, and among the Guanches of the Canary Isles, who are supposed to be the last representatives of the inhabitants of Atlantis, which sank under the waters at the close of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... very remote antiquity, he has been very stationary in civilization and in attaining the arts of life, if he be compared with the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Red Indian of America, or even with the aborigines of Polynesia." ("The most remarkable proof of the inferiority of the Negro, when compared with the Asiatic, is, that whilst the latter has domesticated the elephant for ages, and rendered it highly useful to man, the Negro has ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... destroyed by it, in precisely the same way that new diseases coming to peoples unused to them are far more malignant than among peoples who have suffered from them generation after generation. Such instances as the terrible ravages of measles in Polynesia and the ruin worked by fire-water among the Red Indians, he gives in great abundance. He infers from this that interference with the sale of drink to a people may in the long run do more harm than good, by preserving those who would otherwise be eliminated, permitting them ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells |
