228 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Apart from the work of Codrington and the special investigations 

 of Parkinson, Danks, Fison, Von Pfeil and a few others, how little is 

 known about the practises and beliefs of the varied natives of the 

 Melanesian archipelago. Our knowledge of their physical characteris- 

 tics is slight; we have collections of many of the objects they make, but 

 of what they do and think our knowledge is as insufficient as it can 

 well be. 



The case is not so bad for Polynesia, but even then most of our 

 information is scrappy and many branches of inquiry are practically 

 untouched. Books of travel and missionary records afford ample testi- 

 mony to the great change that has come over these people. Much is 

 irrevocably lost; but if steps are taken without delay some facts of 

 importance may yet be rescued. 



What occurs with almost dramatic rapidity or thoroughness in islands 

 takes place also on the lowland areas where the white man comes into 

 close contact with native races. There are many tracts of Africa which 

 are in need of immediate investigation by trained observers. 



Fortunately there is no need to point the moral for North America ; 

 although much yet remains to be done, the American anthropologists 

 have not neglected the indigenes whom their civilization is repressing. 

 They, too, recognize that in most cases it is only the fragments of the 

 past that they are able to recover. What they have accomplished has 

 been due mainly to the wise liberality of public-spirited business men. 



There is no need to continue, examples could be multiplied indefi- 

 nitely; our scientific literature is full of laments of the insufficiency of 

 our knowledge of almost every custom or belief in every part of the 

 world. Untrained observers have imperfectly recorded events of which 

 they generally knew little and cared less. Those who have traveled 

 are in universal agreement as to the rapid change that everywhere is 

 taking place, and yet many anthropologists are content to measure 

 skulls or to describe specimens in museums ! 



A word of warning is not unnecessary. There is still a great danger 

 that travelers will make it their first endeavor to amass extensive col- 

 lections quite regardless of the fact that a sketch or a photograph of 

 an object about which full particulars have been collected is of much 

 greater scientific value than the possession of the object without the 

 information. The rapid sweeping up of specimens from a locality does 

 great harm to ethnology. As a rule only the makers of an object can 

 give full details respecting it, and no traveler who is here to-day and 

 gone to-morrow can get all the requisite information. This takes time 

 and patience. The rapid collector may get some sort of a story with 

 his specimen, but he has no time to check the information by appeal to 

 other natives, no time to go over the details in order to see that he has 



