[Footnote 192:  See this vocabulary, at the end of vol. ii. of Dalrymple’s Collection of Voyages.  And yet, though Tasman’s people used the words of this vocabulary in speaking to the natives of Tongataboo, (his Amsterdam,) we are told, in the accounts of his voyage, that they did not understand one another;—­a circumstance worth observing, as it shews how cautious we should be, upon the scanty evidence afforded by such transient visits as Tasman’s, and, indeed, as those of most of the subsequent navigators of the Pacific Ocean, to found any argument about the affinity, or want of affinity, of the languages of the different islands.  No one, now, will venture to say, that a Cocos man, and one of Tongataboo, could not understand each other.  Some of the words of Horn Island, another of Schouten’s discoveries, also belong to the dialect of Tongataboo.—­See Dalrymple, as above.—­D.]

We were able to collect several hundreds of the words; and, amongst these, are terms that express numbers as far as a hundred thousand, beyond which they never would reckon.  It is probable, indeed, that they are not able to go farther; for, after having got thus far, we observed, that they commonly used a word which expresses an indefinite number.  A short specimen, selected from the larger vocabulary, is here inserted, with the corresponding words, of the same signification, as used at Otaheite, on the opposite column; which, while it will give, as we may say, ocular demonstration of their being dialects of the same language, will, at the same time, point out the particular letters, by the insertion, omission, or alteration of which, the variations of the two dialects, from each other, have been effected.

It must be observed, however, that our vocabularies of this sort must necessarily be liable to great mistakes.  The ideas of those, from whom we were to learn the words, were so different from ours, that it was difficult to fix them to the object of enquiry.  Or, if this could be obtained, to learn an unknown tongue from an instructor who did not know a single word of any language that his scholar was conversant with, could not promise to produce much.  But even when these difficulties were surmounted, there still remained a fruitful source of mistake, I mean, inaccuracy in catching exactly the true sound of a word, to which our ears had never been accustomed, from persons whose mode of pronunciation was, in general, so indistinct, that it seldom happened that any two of us, in writing down the fame word, from the same mouth, made use of the same vowels in representing it.  Nay, we even, very commonly, differed about consonants, the sounds of which are least liable to ambiguity.  Besides all this, we found, by experience, that we had been led into strange corruptions of some of the most common words, either from the natives endeavouring to imitate us, or from our having misunderstood them.  Thus, cheeto was universally used by us, to