(1) There is no ethnological picture more piquant in the whole world for its striking contrasts than that of Polynesia. We have seen this in its customs, its language, and its religious and mythological ideas. But most piquant is it when we turn to its arts and industries. Here we have co-existent some of the most primitive to be found on the face of the earth, and some of the most advanced, the arts of the savage cheek by jowl with those of the highly civilised, and the strangest feature of it all is that it lies between two great types of civilisation, the ancient type of the Asiatic coasts, bred by long intercourse with other nations and races, and the young or self-bred civilisations of the American Pacific coast. That for thousands of years it was quarantined from these, in spite of its maritime skill and far-voyaging tendency, is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the history of man.