RAPANUI SOURCES AND VARIETY. 39 



tilled may surely yield some crop, as is the way of fallows when brought 

 under tilth. 



One general statement must be held to condition this manner of 

 inquiry. We are dependent upon brief vocabularies. I would be the 

 last to suggest that they be held in disesteem ; they represent, one and 

 all, the best result of the life work of men who needed these word-lists 

 as tools for the prosecution of a task to which they had dedicated their 

 energies with the blessing and the inspiration of sacrifice of self. I am 

 fond of these Polynesian dictionaries, old and warm and now grown 

 shabby friends of my study. Their simple statements are the warrant of 

 their honesty. But we must recognize that their definitions are incom- 

 plete and without exception they are superficial. Not one has felt the 

 call to delve below the convenience of the word, as speech medium of 

 thought interchange, to discover the germ thought out of which variety 

 of expression may derive.* In this dictionary of Rapanui we find that 

 tuu may mean a post, it may mean to be; in sister languages it means to 

 dwell. Each of these definitions is a good definition so far as it goes. 

 It is only when through widely spread comparison we establish for tuu 

 its plasm of primary sense, which seems to render it a descriptive desig- 

 nation of the relation to the common bench or plane of reference which 

 is borne by an object cognizable as in general protrusive or external it 

 is only then that we find it possible to regard these three variants as 

 equally secondary in varying directions. 



To see our way through these tangles we must have some knowledge 

 of what the islander selects for cognition out of anything perceived, 

 and what manner of character of any object of such cognition he selects 

 as generic and what as individual. We must remember that this man, 

 as a thinking man, is not under governance of the laws which we have 

 painfully elaborated in the experiences of our own thought life. Our 

 teachers find it a stupid boy who, when he deals with this problem of an 

 arithmetic, once mental but now oral (as perhaps prefiguring a knowl- 

 edge in time to come that in its bearing upon culture it is but lip ser- 

 vice), "if there were 27 sheep in a pasture and you saw 3 sheep jump 

 the fence how many sheep would be left in the pasture?", answers "no 

 sheep. " A most stupid boy, a boy for whom the bottom of the row is 

 appointed ; a boy most wise, a boy for whom a worthy place in life is 

 appointed. For there is a wisdom of figures and there is a wisdom of 

 sheep, and this boy knew sheep. Which apologue may serve to remind 

 us that in this branch of the inquiry we are to give to savage wisdom 

 our attention with no prejudice. 



In the examination of this material for sense concord and for sense 

 variety as the data may exhibit, we shall continue to find it advan- 



*Both simple and superficial we extract from the early pages of Judge Andrews's Hawaiian 

 Dictionary: 

 aapa, adj. Presumptuous, as when a drunken man lies down on a precipice. 



