32 VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. CHAP. II. On the occasion of our first interview with the chief with whom we were now conversing, whenever he required the agreeable stimulus, which was tolerably frequent, the at tendant slave who was usually squatted behind him, pre sented to him a short piece of bamboo cane, about nine inches or a foot long, and less than an inch in diameter, beautifully polished, and ornamented with rings. Into the end of this cylindrical case a circular piece of cane or wood attached to a long tassel of silk threads was neatly fitted. When the slave had removed this ingeniously contrived stopper or lid, the chief took the cylinder, and, shaking a small quantity, about half a teaspoonful, into the palm of his hand, he then by a quick jerk of the hand tossed the powder with great dexterity on to his tongue, without touching his lips with his hand or its contents. I do not remember ever seeing any of the natives smoking tobacco, but this use of it is universal; and though some deposit it in a different man ner in the mouth, it was usually, as in this instance, jerked upon the tongue. I now occupied myself in testing my progress in the lan guage, by asking the names of different objects, which I wrote down as the natives pronounced them; and I was much struck with the perfect identity of the Malagasy and the Eastern Polynesians in the names of many of the things most common to both. One of these was a cocoa-nut tree, and to my sur prise they pronounced the name precisely as a South Sea Islander would have done. The same was the case with the pandanus or vacoua, one of the most common trees on the coast both of Madagascar and Tahiti; also the word for flower, and the names of several parts of the human body. The numerals were also, with but slight variation, identically the same. The discovery of this resemblance between the lan guages spoken by two communities so widely separated from each other, besides seeming to point out the source whence