332 THE POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS. 



Daytime is life time, its joys are joys only when the eye can see clearly. 

 When the shadows snap suddenly upon the swiftly fading glow of the sunset 

 the cruel gods are abroad, man in black terror cowers with his kin in a 

 gloomy home about the fat smoke and dull glow of his string of kindled 

 candlenuts. From the dusk of evening until the eastern gleam he will not 

 venture from his shelter except that, under the pricking of his scatomantic 

 dread, in some middle hour he slinks out under the wheeling stars and to 

 the beach where in the darkness and the swirl of the tide not even the 

 whistling gods may see that which might work him harm. Man may live 

 heedless days, but when it comes to the reckoning it is the nights he counts, 

 the nights he has lived through. Here, there, and well nigh everywhere in 

 the Pacific world, po as night means calendar day. The Maori goes yet 

 farther: po may mean to him a season, it may mean the obscurity of 

 eternity. 



We now pass to the consideration of the forms of this stem beyond the 

 Polynesian limits. Our records are too scanty to reveal in Melanesia the 

 existence of the pongis stem, but pongi is very common, pong is of equal 

 frequency, po is rare. 



We observe a group of forms in which the initial consonant is subjected 

 to a wide yet systematic variation. This peculiarity is known as the Mela- 

 nesian q. It is a composite of k and b and w; in this composite k may 

 become ngg, b may become mb or p. It is not to be interpreted as the effort 

 on the part of Melanesians to compass an unwonted Polynesian sound, for 

 it is of far greater frequency in Melanesian words for which we can find no 

 affiliation with Polynesia. Rather are we to regard it as showing the 

 struggle in sound evolution by a primitive people in the genesis of their 

 speech who are coming into first possession of a labial mute and whose 

 untrained buccal muscles reveal to us the wrestling. And if we can thus 

 look upon the birth of one sound in human speech may we not indulge 

 ourselves in the fancy that man went through a similar struggle to acquire 

 each of the consonant sounds in his phonetic system? At last across ages, 

 uncountable ages, we see the first of speaking men lifting himself above the 

 crying animal when he is teaching the muscles of his tongue to move its 

 tip here and there within the mouth to give him some clumsy / or fugitive 

 ;■ which is to give him speech, and upon speech knowledge, and perhaps to 

 some chosen ones of his remote descendants the promise of intelligence. 



It is not without interest that we are in a position to observe the Mela- 

 nesian rounding out his phonetic range by this last gift of the labial mute, 

 even though it strike our ears as anything but sweet concord of sounds. 

 In the Polynesian material here under discussion we encounter the Mela- 

 nesian q but twice besides its presence in the variation of this stem, namely : 

 naja (157) a drum Malekula Uripiv nambivi; and 'upenga (151) a net 

 Motlav kmbweng Volow nggmbiveng. An index of its frequency in Mela- 

 nesian will be seen in the fact that in Codrington's Mota dictionary there 

 are no less than 337 principal entries under ^-initial, and yet Mota has 

 already attained to the possession of v and p. 



The Aneityum forms give in poing (perhaps a 1 243 metathesis of pongi) 

 the transition to ping, the only wide variant from the radical 0. Motu boi is 

 bongi with elision of ng; this is found so uniformly (309, 332, 346, 350) that 



