eat’, and nondo, ‘he can eat’, words derived from the 
stem non, ‘eat’. He thinks the word used for ‘mush- 
room’ is a homonym and unrelated to non. We may 
accept his opinion in the present state of our knowledge 
of the native language, but if as a result of his further 
studies he should change his mind, we should (as we were 
tempted to do in the first place) be presented with proof 
of an association of ideas that would have considerable 
ethnomvcological meaning. The fact is that the food 
gathering stage of culture is not far distant in the Wahgi 
Valley, and many species of mushrooms are still an im- 
portant source of nourishment for the Kuma, as for other 
New Guinea ethnic groups such as the Gadsup.* Before 
the introduction of the sweet potato and the taro, it is 
possible, even probable, that mushrooms played a still 
more important part in the lives of these primitive 
peoples. In this tropical land where rain is not lacking, 
mushrooms are gathered during most of the year, and it 
would not be surprising if the word expressing the act 
of eating were applied in a secondary sense to the daily 
nourishment brought back from the bush and the deep 
forest. 
We remained in the Wahgi from the 27th of August 
until the middle of September, most of the time in Kon- 
dambi, a native village where we were the only out- 
siders. In the middle 50’s Marie Reay had spent 15 
months =here: she was now returning for the first time. 
The villagers greeted her with noisy manifestations of 
affection, and her introduction was invaluable to us. We 
but it seeras to us that usage has already expressed its preference for 
the former. Our stay in New Guinea was too short to satisfy us that 
we had obtained an accurate method of phonetic transcription of the na- 
tive names, but we believe that our transcriptions will be recognizable. 
° Vide Heim, Roger: ‘Les Champignons alimentaires des Gadsup’, 
Cahiers du Pacifique, Paris, fasc. 6, p. 12, June 1964. 
[7] 
