Читать книгу Lolóma, or two years in cannibal-land. A story of old Fiji онлайн

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With this picture of Pacific highways before us, it is barely possible to arrive at any other conclusion, than that the continent of Asia, in vastly remote ages it may be, was spread out over the greater portions, if not the whole, of what is now known as the North, North-West, and South Central Pacific. We may reasonably suppose it to have been inhabited by those races who in the first ages of their history sought the Rising Sun. Volcanic action, and oceanic erosion were early at work at their great engineering task of sinking and wearing away all the lower and less protected foundations; but man lived on, taking and keeping possession of the isolated higher lands to which by very gradual, perhaps almost imperceptible degrees, he had been driven. Does not this seem a better theory with respect to these Polynesians, than one which would have us believe that, in miserable little canoes, they must at different times have drifted away from Asia, for thousands of miles against a whole army of opposing elements—tides, ocean currents, trade winds, &c.