NAMES OF VITIAN PALMS. 289 
The differentiation of the names both in number and complexity is 
from east to west, and in the Viti (Fiji) Islands we have an additional 
indication that the people who brought the name had been acquainted 
with the cocoanut before they met with the several other species of 
palms indigenous in that group of islands, This is inferred from the 
fact that although the name #/« applies especially to the nut rather 
than to the tree among the Polynesians, it is used by the Melanesians 
of Vitiasa generic term to include all the local palms. The tendency 
of primitive races generally is to have separate names not only for 
each species, but for varieties and parts of useful plants, and accord- 
ing to Seeman the Fijians are ‘tthe only people who in’ their barba- 
rous state had a collective term for the palms.” But that the name 
elsewhere applied only to the cocoanut was employed for this generic 
use can scarcely mean anything else than that the cocoanut was known 
and named before the other Vitian palms were encountered. For if 
we think of the original Vitians as aboriginals of their own islands 
they should be expected to have had separate names for their palms as 
for other indigenous plants, and the cocoanut, if introduced by natural 
or accidental means, would, at the most, have received the name of one 
of the native species. But that the palms of Viti should all be desig- 
nated as different kinds of #/ or cocoanuts can scarcely be inter- 
preted in connection with the general distribution of that name except 
as indicating that the people who brought the name x/w to Viti were 
already familiar with the cocoanut, but had not come in contact or, at 
least, had not given names to other Pacific palms until they reached 
Viti, where the Malayan palm flora begins to make its appearance. In 
Samoa, the first archipelago to the east of Viti, where the name 7/1 
is also used for the cocoanut, there are only two indigenous palms, and 
these are apparently so rare and unimportant that they have received 
no native names.' In Viti, however, Seeman found twelve indigenous 
palms, several of which grow at comparatively low elevations and are 
used for timber and other economic purposes. There is even a native 
sago palm, Sagus o/tiens/s, but this was also called a/v (ai sora), a 
fact further at variance with the idexof an emigration from the Malay 
Archipelago, where the sago palm furnishes so important an article of 
diet. Strangely enough, Seeman found on one of the Viti islands 
another name, svge or songo, evidently contributed by the Melanesian 
or Papuan constituent of the population of Fiji, but as a name merely, 
the art of extracting sago being unknown in Fiji until taught by 
Seeman. 
These facts taken together seem to furnish the hitherto missing clue 
to the origin and direction of the migration of the race which brought 
the Malayo-Polynesian language, the cocoanut, the sweet potato, the 
yams, and other American food plants into the Pacific: the race which 
1 Reinecke, Die Flora der Samoa-Insel, in Engler’s Bot, Jahrb., 25, p. 588 (1898). 
