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 traditions in regard to
events subsequent to the creation of man. "In one of the sacrificial
hymns of the Marquesans, when human victims were offered, frequent
allusions were made to 'the red apples eaten in Naoau,' ... and to the
'tabooed apples of Atea,' as the cause of death, wars, pestilence,
famine, and other calamities, only to be averted or atoned for by the