he reptilian class were two species of
harmless lizards, so that it is not conceivable that the
Hawaiian notion of a mo'o was derived from objects present in
his island home. The word _mo'o_ may have been a coinage of
the Hawaiian speechcenter, but the thing it stood for must
have been an actual existence, like the python and cobra of
India, or the pterodactyl of a past geologic period. May we
not think of it as an ancestral memory, an impress, of
Asiatic sights and experiences?

In this connection, it will not, perhaps, lead us too far
afield, to remark that in the Hawaiian speech we find the
chisel-marks of Hindu and of Aryan scoring deep-graven. For
instance, the Hawaiian, word _pali_, cliff or precipice, is
the very word that Young-husband--following, no doubt, the
native speech of the region, the Pamirs--applies to the
mountain-walls that buttress off Tibet and the central
plateaus of Asia from northern India. Again the Hawaiian word
_mele_, which we have used so often in these chapters as to
make it seem almost like a household word, corresponds in
form, in sound, and in meaning to the Greek. [Greek: melos:
[Page 261] ta mele], lyric poetry (Liddell and Scott). Again, take the
Hawaiian word _i'a_, fish--Maori, _ika_; Malay, _ikan_; Java,
_iwa_; Bouton, _ikani_ (Edward Tregear: The Maori-Polynesian
Comparative Dictionary). Do not these words form a chain that
links the Hawaiian form to the [Greek: ichthus] of classic
Greece? The subject is fascinating, but it would soon lead us
astray. These examples must suffice.

If we can not give a full account of the tangled woodland of
Hawaiian literature, it is something to be able to report on
its fruits and the manner of men and beasts that dwelt
therein. Are its fruits good for food, or does the land we
have explored bring forth only poisonous reptiles and the
deadly upas? Is it a land in which the very principles of art
and of human nature are turned upside down? Its language the
babble of Bander-log?

This excursion into the jungle of Hawaiian literature should
at least impress us with the