green banners of Tahiti's cocoanut palms again we would travel not
only forward over leagues of tossing water but backward across
centuries of time. For in those islands isolated from the world for
eons there remains a living fragment of the childhood of our
Caucasian race.

Darwin's theory is that these islands are the tops of a submerged
continent, or land bridge, which stretches its crippled body along
the floor of the Pacific for thousands of leagues. A lost land,
whose epic awaits the singer; a mystery perhaps forever to be
unsolved. There are great monuments, graven objects, hieroglyphics,
customs and languages, island peoples with suggestive legends--all,
perhaps, remnants of a migration from Asia or Africa a hundred
thousand years ago.

Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured the Caucasian people, the
dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the continent fell from
the sight of sun and stars save in those spots now the mountainous
islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas, the survivors were isolated
for untold centuries.

Here in these islands the brothers of our long-forgotten ancestors
have lived and bred since the Stone Age, cut off from the main
stream of mankind's development. Here they have kept the childhood
customs of our white race, savage and wild, amid their primitive and
savage life. Here, three centuries ago, they were discovered by the
peoples of the great world, and, rudely encountering a civilization
they did not build, they are dying here. With their passing vanishes
the last living link with our own pre-historic past. And I was to see
it, before it disappears forever.