6oo 



NATURE 



[pa. 23. 1879 



tattooed" (p. 488). Good photographs of Fijians are so 

 common now and so easily procured that it is a great pity 

 one of these was not copied for the book. 



With regard to cannibahsm in Fiji the statement is 

 made that perhaps nowhere in the world has human life 

 been so recklessly destroyed or cannibalism been reduced 

 to such a system as here, and the putting of twenty bodies 

 into the ovens at one feast is described as most astonish- 

 ing ; yet the New Zealanders, who are necessarily also 

 treated of in this book, were quite as systematic in their 

 cannibalism and far more profuse, as many as 1,000 

 prisoners having been slaughtered and put in the ovens 

 at one time by them after a successful battle. 



In the general account of Polynesia the Polynesians 

 are said to have no bows and arrows. This is a mistake ; 

 both Hawaiians and Tahitians had bows and arrows, as 

 we know from the writings of Cook and Ellis, though 

 they did not use these weapons for war purposes. 

 Ellis's account of the sacred archery of Huahine, where 

 the ancient archery ground was close to his residence, 

 is most interesting and full of detail. Bows and 

 arrows were also used in Tonga and Samoa. To 

 say of Polynesians generally that "all the men are 

 tattooed from the navel to the thigh" (p. 495) is strangely 

 misleading, since it would appear from it that all Poly- 

 nesians were alike in their customs of tattooing, whereas, 

 as is well known, the greatest differences occurred in 

 this matter, and the description quoted would apply 

 almost solely to the Samoans and Tongans, though there 

 was a slight difference even between these two races in 

 the matter. 



Still more misleading is the statement that the Poly- 

 nesians " have none of the savage thirst for blood of the 

 Fijians," and that "their ceremonies are polluted by no 

 human sacrifices ; cannibalism with them has never 

 become a habit." To such an absurd conclusion regarding 

 Polynesians is the author led by his having separated off 

 the New Zealanders from the Polynesians into a separate 

 chapter. He treats of the New Zealanders correctly later 

 on as " Brown Polynesians," like those he is describing 

 as above. But cannibalism was not confined to New 

 Zealanders amongst the Polynesians, but widely spread 

 amongst all, occurring in the Hervey Islands, Paumotu 

 Tahiti, the Sandwich Islands, the Marquesas, and else- 

 where. Human sacrifices were also regular institutions in 

 all the islands, for example, in Hawaii, Tahiti, and the 

 Marquesas, and in the latter group men killed their wives 

 and children, and their aged parents for eating. In the 

 time of Cook cannibalism was very much on the decline 

 in Samoa and the Sandwich Islands, and had ceased in 

 Tahiti, but evidence of its former more common occurrence 

 was preserved in popular legends, proverbs, and tradi- 

 tions, and in some curious ceremonial customs. In the 

 Paumotu Islands it long remained a regular institution, 

 and Ellis saw a captive child there given a piece of its 

 own father's body to eat. But what can be expected from 

 a work on Polynesia which is without a reference to Ellis's 

 " Researches," and in which Tonga is treated of without 

 a reference to Mariner, or even mention of his name ? 



In the account of Tahiti Mr. Wallace becomes quite 

 poetical, but stumbles rather in his zoology in consequence ; 

 he writes : — " The wayfarer's ears are ravished by the music 

 of various songsters arrayed in the brilliant plumage of the 



tropics." There is, indeed, one thrush-like bird {Tatare 

 longirostris) in Tahiti which sings sweetly, especially in 

 the higher mountain regions, but it is no more brilliantly 

 coloured than are singing birds usually elsewhere, in fact 

 as dull as most songsters in appearance. There are 

 brightly-coloured birds amongst the meagre list of about 

 twenty-six land-birds of the island, but these are fruit- 

 pigeons, parrots, and king-fishers. Though the great 

 denudation of the surface of Tahiti is referred to the 

 extraordinary steep and narrow ridges thus formed, and 

 which are such characteristic features of its surface are not 

 mentioned. The following passage will be most amusing 

 to any one who knows anything of Tahiti. " At present 

 we must visit the interior in order to see in their original 

 forms the seductive dances of the native women, 

 gaily decked with flowers." In fact the interior of the 

 island is mountainous throughout, and uninhabited. The 

 natives know very little about it, and it is quite a feat for 

 a European to make his way across it. The dances in 

 question take place usually close to the sea-shore, when 

 they do occur now, and a large bribe administered to one 

 of the native washermen will generally set one on foot, 

 these worthies ministering to the pleasures of tourists as 

 well as washing their clothes. 



In the account of Rapanui (Easter Island), the con- 

 clusion " that at present the island is the great myster) of 

 the Pacific, and that the more we know of its antiquities, 

 the less we are able to understand them," is unworthy of 

 the present state of ethnological knowledge. Too much 

 mystery is made about the stone images of Rapanui, and 

 in his "Tropical Nature," p. 291, Mr. Wallace, following 

 Mr. A. Mott, actually brings these images forward as one 

 of the proofs of a former general advanced intellectual 

 condition of mankind as opposed to the accepted scientific 

 position that primitive man was savage. 



Earlier in the book he similarly cites the big upright 

 stones found by Brenchley in Tongatabu as proving the 

 existence of a preceding more highly civilised race. 

 It is misleading to term these Rapanui remains "pre- 

 historic," as implying that they have any vast antiquity. 

 There is no reason to doubt that the present islanders, 

 who are by language of Raratongan origin and by tradition 

 come from Rapa Island, are the direct descendants of 

 those who set up the images and constructed the under- 

 ground houses for their chiefs. The wooden tablets ^vith 

 hieroglyphic inscriptions, and wooden gods cannot be very 

 old, and the same characters are inscribed on the br.cks 

 of the stone images, as may be seen in the case of the 

 one in the British Museum as are cut on the slabs. The 

 stone crowns on the images' heads merely represent the 

 feather head-dresses worn by the chiefs. Similar blocks 

 were appended to the heads of some of the Sand^vich 

 Islands gods and to the stone gods of the Marquesas 

 Islands. The stone images are in point of artistic execu- 

 tion miserably low, and their workmanship does not go to 

 prove that any high development of culture existed here in 

 former times, though the absence of artistic merit would 

 hardly be allowed to prove the opposite condition as to 

 general culture by such authorities at least as those who 

 ately erected a row of stone heads very little more ad- 

 vanced in their resemblance to the human form in front 

 of the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. The Rapanui stone 

 images resemble the wooden ones of the island in feature- 



