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Chester cottons and prints, are the best articles for trading with these islanders. The New Zealanders only, and the inhabitants of the Chatham Islands, inhabiting a higher latitude, purchase blankets and woollen goods. Over the Polynesian archipelago, from the latitude of Norfolk Island, in 30° S., to that of the Sandwich Islands, in 20° N., a distance of three thousand miles, there reigns a perpetual summer, tempered even in the equatorial region by those alternations of land and sea breezes, which are as regular in their recurrence as the rising and setting of the sun. We might suppose the poet to have dreamed of Polynesia and its thousand isles, when he penned the following lines to the “ Southern Wind”— “ Long hast thou lingered ’midst those islands fair, Which lie like jewels in the Indian deep, ’Mid green waves all asleep, Fed by the summer suns and azure air.” Nature has formed this insular region for the culture or spontaneous growth of the rarest and richest productions of the earth. The sugar of Otaheite is equal to that of the Mauritius; the banana and the cocoa palm flourish throughout these islands as luxuriantly as in Java, and the cultivated productions of Norfolk Island are similar to those of Madeira. In short, spices, coffee, sugar, silk, and cotton, are as capable of successful culture in the Marquesas, the Feegees, or New Caledonia, as in the Moluccas, Java, or the West Indies. As yet, the commercial intercourse of the Australian colonies with Polynesia is very limited, but when the extra-tropical portions of Australia, the Islands of New Zealand, and the other newly-opened fields of industry in that quarter of the globe, shall contain a population pro-
