PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY J. & J. HARPER, NO. 82 CLIFF-STREET. AND SOLD BY THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES. 16 1833. IN issuing the first volume of his RESEARCHES in their present form, the author begs to express his grateful sense of the favourable notice which the original publication received from several leading literary journals, as well as its encouraging reception from the circle of his immediate friends, and the public at large. He is also happy in being thus able to comply with the suggestions of a number of highly respected individuals, who have expressed their wishes that the work might be published in a cheaper and more portable form. The reasonable price of the present volumes, and their periodical publication, will, it is hoped, secure the object desired their more extensive circulation. The less important parts have been slightly abridged, the whole has been arranged in a regular methodical order, and the history of the extension of Christianity in the South Seas continued to the date of the latest intelligence. As the Sandwich Islands form the northern boundary of Polynesia, in order to render the work more complete, the account of those islands originally entitled "Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii, or Owhyhee," is published in a corresponding manner, under the same title : this will constitute a fourth volume of POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. Thus improved, and imbodying much recent interesting information, the author anticipates for the present volumes a reception equal to that with which their predecessors were favoured. |
