142 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



seems to have acquired an exceptional power of expansion and 

 contraction, enabling them at one time to consume incredible 

 quantities of food, at another to go fasting for days together 

 without feeling any ill effects from such violent oscillations 

 between want and surfeit. They were also earth-eaters, while 

 cannibalism and the institution of taboo, if originally associated 

 with religion, had certainly lost that character in New Caledonia, 

 where they are mainly connected with the eternal food question. 



In the absence of game and cattle the natives could become 

 neither hunters nor pastors, and were driven to fishing and 

 agriculture to supplement the scanty resources of the land flora 

 and fauna. Hence it is as fishers and husbandmen that they 

 became one of the most advanced peoples in the Oceanic world. 

 The skill displayed in the irrigation of their taro fields was rivalled 

 only by the natives of Fiji. 



Like the Levites amongst the Jews, the office of takata (priest 



or wizard) was hereditary, and the chief feature of 



Trans- their religion was the cult of the dead. In fact the 



migration and 



Pessimism. gods, all evil, were, as in Bantuland, the souls of 

 the departed, and especially of the chiefs, who 

 acquired increased power of working harm by migrating into 

 sharks, the winds, or thunder-storms. Thus the spirits of their 

 forefathers that oppressed them in life bestride the whirlwind in 

 death, and continue to harry the living by disturbing the order of 

 nature. All this developed a gloomy, sullen temperament, a 

 pessimistic mood and the ferocity of despair, as displayed especially 

 at the tribal gatherings (/////-/////), and in the orgies after the taro 

 feast, which often ended in massacres and hideous scenes of 

 cannibalism. 



Returning to the Papuan lands proper, in the insular groups 



west of New Guinea we enter one of the most en- 



Ptmuuti tangled ethnical regions in the world. Here are, no 



doubt, a few islands such as the Aru group, mainly 



inhabited by full-blood Papuans, men who furnished Wallace with 



the models on which he built up his true Papuan type, which 



has since been vainly assailed by so many later observers. But 



in others Ceram, Buru, Timor, and so on to Flores diverse 



ethnical and linguistic elements are intermingled in almost 



