president's address — SECTION F. 177 



will produce effects he had never anticipateed if, as is often the 

 case, these societies provide the basis of the whole economic system 

 of the people and embody religious practices of the utmost 

 importance to their material and moral welfare." 



Custom of Caunihala of the Purari Delta. 



It m^ust, however, be admitted that some of the practices one 

 finds are so utterly senseless that one can hardly imagine that they 

 ever had any real meaning. For instance, in the Purari Delta 

 and in many other districts it was the custom not to eat the man 

 you had killed — your friends ate him. and you ate the man your 

 friend had killed. However, on the Purari there were certain 

 conditions under which you might break through this rule, but the 

 ritual was rather strict. You had to sit on a cocoanut (in itself 

 not an easy task) with a cocoanut under each heel (a still more 

 difficult thing) ; and, while so seated, you might get your daughter 

 to boil the man's heart, and then you might drink the water in 

 which the heart was boiled, and even eat a little of the heart itself 

 — but you must be seated on the cocoanut all the time. It is a 

 difficult act of faith to believe that this particular custom ever had 

 any meaning; but, at any rate, whatever its meaning may have 

 been, it was not a custom to encourage, so it had to go, and it 

 went. But perhaps, if we knew the life of the Purari people 

 more intimately, we should see that a lot of other things, good, 

 bad, and indifferent, went with it. 



The Xob() House. 



Then there vas the rather mysterious custom of the Nobo 

 house, which came to light in connexion with the murder of a 

 village constable called Papia, in the Boboi District, at the back 

 of Mekeo. Papia belonged to oiie of the villages in the plain, and 

 had gone to a dance in the Boboi Mountains, where he was killed 

 and eaten. When the officer in charge of the police arrived at the 

 village where the murder had been committed, he noticed the 

 charred remains of a house ^.t some distance frcn\ the other houses, 

 and asked what it was. " Oh," said the villagers, " that was a 

 Noboi house." " It seems to have been burnt down," said the 

 officer. " Of course," was the reply; " we always burn down the 

 Nobo house." " Well, what is a Nobo bouse?" he asked, and the 

 matter was then explained to him. The Nobo house, it appears, 

 is always built at some little distance from the village, and is used 

 as a trap for unwary strangers — in this particular instance, for 

 Papia. Papia. the culprits told me afterwards, " was a fat man 

 with a light skin, and we wanted to eat him too much," so, when 

 the conversation had turned upon the recent dance and upon 

 feathers, and plumes, and other ornaments, one of the Boboi 

 casually remarked that there were some very fine feathers in the 

 Nobo house, and that if Papia would walk over there he would 

 show them to him. The unsuspecting village constable fell in 



