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

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From such a theory as this it may not be wrong further to presume, at least till some better theory arises out of scientific investigation, that, just as these countless islands stand decked in orient beauty, as so many broken monuments to show us where Eastern Asia once stretched forth her arms, so the red, brown, and black Polynesian tribes remain to tell us how the teeming populations of that great continent once flowed eastward, even until they reached the American world, and were stayed in their course only by the Atlantic. Every separate group seems to strengthen this view by its geological character, its geographical position, and its legendary lore.

Fiji is the largest group of Islands in the Western Pacific. In looking at its chart the thought at once strikes us, that the 200 islands which compose it must, at some remote period, have been connected by lands which the sea has since engulfed. One cannot escape the suspicion that what is now broken up into a thousand pieces, must once have been a country of large proportions, and of surpassing richness and beauty. And further, if Fiji had not at one time a continental connexion, was it not in itself one vast island instead of many small ones.