from the other,
they are in fact independent and original versions of a once common
legend, or series of legends, held alike by Cushite, Semite, Turanian,
and Aryan, up to a certain time, when the divergencies of national
life and other causes brought other subjects peculiar to each other
prominently in the foreground; and that as these divergencies hardened
into system and creed, that grand old heirloom of a common past became
overlaid and colored by the peculiar social and religious atmosphere
through which it has passed up to the surface of the present time. But
besides this general reason for refusing to adopt the Israelitish
theory, that the Polynesian legends were introduced by fugitive or
emigrant Hebrews from the subverted kingdoms of Israel or Judah,
there is the more special reason to be added that the organization
and splendor of Solomon's empire, his temple, and his wisdom became
proverbial among the nations of the East subsequent to his time;
on all these, the Polynesian legends are absolutely silent."

In commenting on the legend of _Hiiaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele_, Judge
Fornander says: "If the Hebrew legend of Joshua or a Cushite version
give rise to it, it only brings down the community of legends a little
later in time. And so would the legend of _Naulu-a-Mahea_,... unless
the legend of Jonah, with which it corresponds in a measure, as well
as the previous legend of Joshua and the sun, were Hebrew anachronisms
compiled and adapted in later times from long antecedent materials,
of which the Polynesian references are but broken and distorted echoes,
bits of legendary mosaics, displaced from their original surroundings
and made to fit with later associations."

In regard to the account of the Creation, he remarks that "the Hebrew
legend infers that the god Elohim existed contemporaneously with
and apart from the chaos. The Hawaiian legend makes the three great
gods, Kane, Ku, and Lono, evolve themselves out of chaos.... The
order of creation, according to Hawaiian folk-lore, was that after
Heaven and earth had been separated, and the ocean had been stocked
with its animals, the stars were created, then the moon, then the
sun." Alluding to the fact that the account in Genesis is truer to
nature, Judge Fornander nevertheless propounds the inquiry whether
this fact may not "indicate that the Hebrew text is a later emendation
of an older but once common tradition"?

Highest antiquity is claimed for Hawaiian trad