[101] Easter Island Inscriptions.

    Note 99, In vol. vi of the Journal, Mr. White asks some questions about the Easter Island inscriptions, of which I gave translations in former numbers of the Journal, and I now reply to his questions, &c., as follows:^__
    1. With regard to publishing my work upon the mode of decipherment of the hieroglyphics into the Quichua and other languages in which the engravers wrote, and translating these into English, it would cost a considerable sum of money; the enquiries made up to the present show that to print explanatory modes of decipherment of the original figures so as to be clear and comprehensible, and their equivalents in sounds distinct and plain to all, it would be necessary to cast special types for the figures and the parts of the figures of these hieroglyphics so as to show the equivalent form for each sound, that is for the syllable or word, for without this they could not be read. To do this would, it is estimated by the typefounders, cost about from fourteen to fifteen hundred pounds, and theh further expenses of printing, binding, &c., would bring the cost of the work up to about two thousand pounds for five hundred copies; and the probable sales at £4 each would leave a loss, so up to the present the work is not printed.
    2. The evidence, not only of the ideograms, or hieroglyphics, of the inscriptions, as well as their translated information, but also of the buildings, the statues, the platforms, stone-houses, and many other things, all point to South-Western America as the original home of the people who made these statues and other things in Easter Island.
    3. The natives who are in Easter Island now, and those who have been living there during the past three or four centuries, are and were Polynesians, and they use a Polynesian dialect; but these have no resemblance to, nor any connection with, the former people (who in their traditions they call, and distinguish as "the big ears") who were those who made the statues, the platforms, the stone-houses, the inscriptions, and who were killed off by the ancestors of the Polynesians three or four hundred years ago.
    4. The Polynesians never made such works as those found in Easter Island, and the features of the faces of the statues are quite different and distinct from those of Polynesians, but are quite like the natives of America who made them from about 1000 A.D. to 1400 A.D. The figures of the inscriptions are only found to have representatives in America. Some of the vaults and the houses have the true stone arch, with its keystone, a thing quite unknown in Polynesia but found in S.W. America.
    5. Anyone who has studied the native traditions and histories of the peoples of S.W. and Central America will know that voyages were undertaken for many purposes, and frequently from the coasts of America to other places, and among other parts and places to some of the islands of the Pacific, and that these voyagings continued until about a century before the Spanish conquest, and had not quite ceased when the Spaniards first sailed over the Pacific.
    6. Having had personal interviews and written communications with all those who have visited Easter Island, and examined there the remains, and