20 ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH OUTSIDE AMERICA. 



remains to do. There is probably uo part of the world where a larger amount 

 of valuable material can be saved during the next few years than in Melanesia, 

 and yet at the present moment little or nothing is being done. 



AUSTRALIA. 



The aborigines of this country have attracted so much attention in recent 

 years and have already been the subject of so much work that we may now 

 hope to know their culture far more completely than that of most other 

 peoples of the world. There still remains, however, much work to be done, 

 and this of great urgency. Many Australian tribes have already followed 

 the Tasmanians into extinction, and there are many others of which hardly 

 anything remains. A large amount of good intensive work has, however, 

 already been done, and one of the ablest of the younger English ethnologists, 

 Mr. A. R. Brown, is now engaged on a thorough study of the peoples of West 

 Australia, about whom our knowledge has hitherto been very defective, and 

 he proposes to extend his work to other regions. Further, the importance 

 of the problems presented by the aboriginal culture has been recognized by 

 the governments of Australia, as shown by their encouragement of research 

 and their appointment of protectors of the aborigines, who have contributed 

 largely to our knowledge. It is to be hoped that the approaching visit of 

 the British Association will arouse even more fully the interest of Australians 

 in the vanishing culture of their continent, the study of which can safely be 

 left to their enterprise. 



POLYNESIA AND MICRONESIA. 



The islands of the Pacific Ocean present a difficult problem from the 

 point of view of their suitability as a field for ethnographical investigation. 

 In most of them the native culture has been so influenced that it would seem 

 to have passed beyond the point at which any exact knowledge of its former 

 condition is to be expected. Nevertheless the culture of these islands was 

 so unique, and raises so many important problems, that it is necessary to 

 consider fully whether anything should be done to save what remains of the 

 culture in the memories of the people, if not in working activity. Some facts 

 are available which show that the matter is not so hopeless as is usually 

 supposed. There is no part of the Pacific where the native culture would 

 appear to have been wrecked more completely than in the Hawaiian Islands, 

 and yet during a brief visit, five years ago, I was able to collect details of 

 ancient social organization which agreed closely with information recorded 

 forty years earlier by Morgan and Hyde. Again, in Tonga I was able to 

 obtain information, the correctness of which was shown by its agreement 

 with the records of earlier workers, together with other facts which were 

 previously quite unknown to ethnologists. In New Zealand Mr. Elsdon 

 Best is now obtaining from old Maories large stores of information hitherto 

 unrecorded; and in Fiji, a place supposed to have passed beyond the scope 

 of profitable inquiry, Mr. A. M. Hocart has been able, in the last four years, 



