152 president's adbress — section g. 



them is perishing information of the highest anthropological 

 value. There is a still larger field in the New Hebrides, 

 the Solomons, New Britain, New Ireland, and other island 

 groups. Some of these are of special interest because of 

 a real money currency among them — ^shell money — which 

 has a great influence upon the lives of the people. This 

 " commercial savagery," as I have called it — and I see the 

 term is being accepted — is full of interest, and needs 

 investigation. 



There is one piece of good work which any fairly intelli- 

 gent young man could do. Scattered here and there among 

 all manner of books on Australia there are references to the 

 aborigines — sometimes a mere passing reference in the 

 narrative of some incident in which natives were concerned, 

 and, in other cases, more or less ample descriptions of some- 

 thing or other in their mode of life. These require collecting 

 and classifying. What is needed is for some one to go, say, to 

 the Melbourne Public Library, and afterwards to one or two 

 private libraries, in which these books are to be found ; to look 

 through every one of them which he can find on their shelves; 

 to make extracts of all passages which bear upon native 

 custom and beliefs, and, finally, to arrange the extracts under 

 certain heads. The work will become more and more 

 interesting as it grows under the student's hands. At all 

 events, either the facts will continue to be to him what they 

 are very likely to appear to be at first — mere unconnected 

 dry bones, the driest of the dry ; in which case he had better 

 cease from his labour and turn to something else — he has not 

 the anthropological soul ; or he will see the facts grouping 

 themselves into living forms ; they will become articulate, 

 and speak to him if he has ears to hear, and, when he has 

 once heard their voice, he will need no more persuasion from 

 me, or from anybody else, to continue in the work. 



I cannot conclude my address without pointing to the 

 magnificent and all but untrodden field which we have before 

 us in British New Guinea and its outlying groups of islands. 

 There is, probably, no richer field for the anthropologist on 

 all the face of the earth. Sir William Macgregor informs 

 me that he has not found among the tribes there any of the 

 exogamous intermarrying divisions which exist almost every- 

 where else, and which are found in islands — New Britain, 

 for instance — near to the New Guinea coast. The people, to 

 use his own expressive phrase, are in a state of " fermenting 

 savagery," and have not yet got moulded into any of the 



