September 17, 1914] 



NATURE 



69 



especially for the natural history- of man, and having 

 had much guidance from many anthropological 

 friends and from books, I have perhaps been espe- 

 cially fortunate in opportunity for studying the more 

 natural human animal at close quarters and in his 

 natural surroundings. I have tried, from as abstract 

 and unprejudiced a point of view as possible, to under- 

 stand the character, the mental and moral attitude, 

 of the natural "savage" as he must have been when 

 civilised folk first found him and, at first without 

 much effort to understand him, tried abruptly to 

 impose an extremely different and alien form of 

 culture on this almost new kind of man. 



I venture to claim, though with diffidence, that I 

 may have begun to discern more clearly, even though 

 only a little more clearly than usual, what the primi- 

 tive man, the natural '' savage " — or, as he might 

 more accurately be described, the wild man — was 

 like ; and it seemed possible that an attempt to bring 

 together a picture — it can hardly be more than a 

 sketch — of the mentality and character of some one 

 group of people who had never passed out of the 

 stage of "savagery" might be interesting and prac- 

 ticalh' useful, especially if it proves possible to dis- 

 entangle the more primitive ideas of such people 

 from those which they subsequently absorbed by con- 

 tact, at first with other wild, but less wild, folk, and 

 later with civilised folk ; and that a further study of 

 the retention by these folk of some of their earlier 

 habits of thought during later stages in their mental 

 development might suggest a probable explanation of 

 certain of their manners and customs for which it is 

 otherwise hard to account. 



The attainment of some such understanding is, or 

 should be, one of the chief objectives of the practical 

 anthropologist, not merety for academic purposes, but 

 also for the practical guidance of those who in so 

 many parts of our Empire are brought into daily 

 contact with so-called "savages." 



Perhaps hardly anywhere else in the world would 

 it be possible to find better opf)ortunity and more suit- 

 able conditions for such a study as I now propose 

 than in the tropical islands of the South Seas. The 

 ancestors of these islanders, while still in purely 

 "savage" condition, must have drifted away from 

 the rest of the human race, and entered into the 

 utter seclusion of that largest of oceans, the Pacific, 

 covering as it does more than a third of the surface 

 of the globe, long before the first man of civilised 

 race, Balboa, in 15 13, from the Peak in Darien, set 

 eyes on the edge of what he called "the Great South 

 Sea," before Magellan, in 1520, forced his way into 

 and across the same sea, which he called the Pacific, 

 and certainly long before civilised men settled on 

 any part of the shore of that ocean, i.e., in 1788, at 

 the foundation of Australia. For when first studied 

 at close quarters by civilised folk from Europe, which 

 was not until after the last-named event, these South 

 Sea "savages" had been in seclusion during a period 

 sufficiently long — and certainly no short period would 

 have sufficed for such an effect — not only for them all 

 to have assumed characters, cultural and even 

 physical, sufficient to distinguish them from all other 

 folk outside the Pacific, but also for them to have 

 split up into many separate parties, probably some- 

 times of but few individuals, many of which had 

 drifted to some isolated island or island-group, and 

 had there in the course of time taken on further well- 

 marked secondary differences. 



It will probatly now never be discovered when, 

 how often, and from what different places the 

 ancestors of these folk reached the Pacific. It is 

 quite possible that they entered again and again, and 

 were carried by winds and currents, some from west 



NO. 2342, VOL. 94] 



\ to east and some in the reverse direction, many perish- 

 \ ing in that waste of waters, but some reaching land 

 and finding shelter on some of that great cloud of 

 small islands which lie scattered on both sides of the 

 equator and nearly across that otherwise landless 

 ocean. 



Of the folk who in those old times thus drifted 

 about and across the Pacific, the most important, for 

 the part which they played in the story which I am 

 endeavouring to tell, were the two hordes of 

 "savages" now known respectively as Melanesians 

 and Polynesians. Without entering deeply into the 

 difficult subject of the earlier migrations of these two 

 hordes, it will suffice here to note that, towards the 

 end of the eighteenth century, when European folk at 

 last began to frequent the South Sea Islands, and 

 when consequently something definite began to be 

 known in Europe about the islanders, certain Melan- 

 esians, who had probably long previously drifted down 

 from north-westward, were found to be. and probably 

 had long been, in occupation of the exceptionally 

 remote and isolated Fiji Islands; also that, long after 

 this Melanesian occupation of tfiese islands, and only 

 shortly before Europeans began to frequent them, 

 several bodies of Polynesians, who had long been in 

 occupation of the Friendly or Tongan islands, lying 

 away to the east of Fiji, had already forced or were 

 forcing their way into the Fijian islands. 



The meeting in Fiji of these two folk, both still 

 in a state of "savager}'," but the Polynesians much 

 further advanced in culture than the Melanesians, at 

 a time before European influence had begun to 

 strengthen in those islands, affords an exceptionally 

 good opportunity for the study of successive stages 

 in the development of primitive character, especially 

 as the two sets of "savages" were not yet so closely 

 intermingled as to be indistinguishable — at least in 

 many parts of Fiji. It is unfortunate that the earlier 

 European visitors to Fiji were not of the kind to 

 obser\'e and to leave proper records of their obser\-a- 

 trons. 



The earlier, Melanesian, occupants of Fiji had to 

 some extent given way, but by no means readily and 

 completely, to the Polynesian invaders. The former, 

 not only in the mountain fastnesses difficult of access, 

 but also in such of the islets as the local wind and 

 weather conditions made difficult of access, retained 

 their own distinct and simpler culture, their own 

 thoughts, habits, and arts, long after the Polynesians 

 had seized the more important places accessible to the 

 sea, and had imposed much of their own more 

 elaborate (but still "savage") culture on such of the 

 Melanesian communities as they had there subjugated 

 and absorbed. 



The social organisation throughout Fiji remained 

 communistic; but in the purely Melanesian communi- 

 ties the system was purely democratic {i.e., without 

 chiefs), while in the newer mixed Polynesian- 

 Melanesian communities — as was natural when there 

 had been intermingling of two unequally cultured 

 races — there had been developed a sort of oligarchic 

 system, in which the Melanesian commoners worked 

 contentedly, or at least with characteristic resignation, 

 for their new Polynesian chiefs. 



Alike in all these communities custom enforced by 

 club-law prevailed ; but in the one case the adminis- 

 1 trative function rested with the community as a whole, 

 while in the other it was usurped by the chiefs. 



Though we are here to consider mainly the ideas, 

 the mentality, of these people, it will be useful to say 

 a few preliminary words as to their arts and crafts. 

 The Melanesians during their long undisturbed occu- 

 pation of the islands had undoubtedly made great 

 progress, on lines peculiar to them, especiallj- in boat 



