distributed among scholars interested in linguistic science. As a result of this and other like evidences of qualification he was appointed in 1837, the year of his graduation from the university, to the office of philologist and ethnographer in the United States Exploring Expedition to the Pacific, under Captain (afterward Admiral) Charles Wilkes. The expedition occupied the years from 1838 to 1842. Mr. Hale's report on Ethnography and Philology, composing the seventh volume of the expedition series, and filling nearly seven thousand quarto pages, appeared in 1846. It is devoted to the physical and mental characteristics, the customs, and the languages of the natives of the Pacific islands (including Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia), and of Australia, northwest America, Patagonia, and southern Africa. The eminent ethnologist. Dr. R. G. Latham, in the preface to his work on The Natural History of the Varieties of Man (1890), describes the contents of Mr. Hale's volume as "the greatest mass of philological data ever accumulated by a single inquirer." He quoted from it freely, as does also Prof. Max Müller in his Lectures on the Science of Language (second series), where he refers particularly to the "excellent Polynesian grammar."
The two portions of this volume which attracted most attention at the time of its publication, and have since most materially influenced the sciences to which it related, are the section which treats of the migrations of the oceanic islanders and that which is devoted to the tribes of northwestern America. The first of these sections, by a large accumulation of traditional and linguistic evidence, determined the origin of the Polynesians from a single island of the Malaisian Archipelago, and fixed not only the probable time and place of their first appearance as emigrants in the Pacific Ocean, but also the period of their settlement in each of the principal groups, showing that both the original migration and the subsequent dispersion were events of comparatively recent occurrence, probably beginning but little before the Christian era, and that the dispersion was, in fact, still going on in our century. The other portion made known for the first time the extraordinary number and variety of languages in northwestern America. The "ethnographical map" prepared by the author showed in what was then the Oregon Territory, comprising the present States of Oregon and Washington, no less than thirty languages and dialects, belonging to twelve distinct stocks, differing totally from one another in both vocabulary and grammar. This is more than twice the number of stocks that are found in the whole of Europe. These and other similar facts led to a theory afterward proposed by Mr. Hale to explain them, as will presently be recorded.
After the publication of this report Mr. Hale spent a few
