Note 988 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, where every condition of land and sea tends to develop the migratory spirit, form a region of extensive colonization.988 Settlements of one race are scattered among the island groups of another, making the ethnic boundaries wide penumbras. In some smaller islands of Melanesia the Polynesian colonists have exterminated or expelled the original inhabitants, and are found there now with all their distinctive race characteristics; but in the larger islands, they have been merged in the resident population, and their presence is only to be surmised from the existence of Polynesian customs, such as father-right in New Hebrides and Solomon Island side by side with the prevailing Melanesian mother-right.989 In small islands, like Tongatabu, Samoa and Fiji, emigration becomes habitual, a gradual spilling over of the redundant population and hence not a formidable inundation. In all this insular region of the Pacific, the impulse to emigration is so persistent, that the resulting inter-insular colonization obliterates sharp distinctions of race; it annuls the segregation of an island environment, and makes everywhere for amalgamation and unification, rather than differentiation.990