NATURE 



569 



THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 1S84 



SAMOA 

 Samoa. A Hundred Years as^o and long before. By 

 George Turner, LL.D. With Preface by E. B. Tylor, 

 F.R.S. (London : Macmillan and Co., 1884.) 



FOR the purposes of comparative ethnology Dr. 

 Turner's new work on Samoa, that group of ten 

 islands in the Pacific which the Frenchman Bougainville 

 named the Navigators' Islands in 176S, is entitled to 

 stand in the same rank with such books as Williams's ac- 

 count of Fiji or Mariner's "Tongan Islands." The careful 

 study of Samom beliefs and customs for a period of more 

 than forty j'ears confers unusual authority on the writer's 

 statements, whilst his description of their heathen con- 

 dition derives more than ordinary value fro n the fact of 

 his having been among the earliest missionaries who 

 visited the islands. Mr. Tylor, in the short preface he 

 has prefixed to the book, speaks with justice of the peculiar 

 interest which attaches to a work that describes Poly- 

 nesian life as seen in its almost unaltered state before 

 contact with European races had inaugurated a period of 

 rapid change and made what was original and native 

 indistinguishable from what was of foreign impor- 

 tation. 



Complete as is the account given by Dr. Turner of 

 Samoan life generally, of the government, social con- 

 dition, and laws, of the people's food, their houses, or 

 their canoes, the main interest and value of the work lies 

 in the chapters which deal with the religious and mytho- 

 logical ideas of the Samoans. The book in this respect 

 is not only a storehouse of curious myths and legends, 

 but it helps to throw light on the vexed question of the 

 origin of mythology as known in other parts of the world. 

 The whole of Samoan mythology is based on the concep- 

 tion of the male and female nature of all things, such as 

 we still find traces of in the genders of European 

 languages. Thus, according to their cosmogony, from 

 the marriage of the high rocks and the earth rocks sprang 

 the earth, from the marriage of the earth and the high 

 winds sprang the solid clouds, and so on till they come to 

 the gods and chiefs down to the individual who was pro- 

 claimed king in the year 1878. 



Stories betraying the same rude conception of nature 

 abound. A girl turns into a mountain without difficulty 

 (p. 117); a certain stone is a coward who fled in battle 

 (p. 45); certain trees are transformed men (pp. 1 ig, 

 219). The important thing is that these and similar 

 stories are spoken of as " seriously believed " by 

 many. " In all these stories the Samoans are rigid 

 literalists and believe in the very words of the tradition " 

 (p. 214V 



Samoan ingenuity has its explanation for the origin of 

 most things : of man himself ; of the name Samoa as well 

 as of that of all the islands and their chief places ; of 

 springs (p. 10); of the sea (p. 12); of pigs (p. ill); and, 

 strangest of all, the story of the origin of cocoa nuts 

 (p. 244). 



Dr. Turner reckons the number of Samoan deities that 

 Vol. XXIX.— No. 755 



had come to his knowledge at 120, yet there was a time 

 when the Samoans were said to have no religion of any 

 kind. Each individual, each household, each village, 

 had his or its peculiar god, incarnate generally in some 

 creature, but sometimes in a stone, a shell, or even a star. 

 The rules and ceremonies of this fetichistic religion re- 

 sembled very much those in vogue in America or Africa. 

 A man, while considering it death to cut or injure the 

 incarnation of his own god, would owe no respect to the 

 incarnation of his neighbours. Illnesses and death were 

 the result of so'.ne offence against the gods, and prayers 

 and offerings played in consequence a large part in the 

 daily life of the Samoans. 



An ill-defined supremacy among the gods belonged to 

 Tangaloa. He made the heavens and the earth. He 

 was specially prayed to before war, before fishing, or 

 before planting, and thunder was the sign that the prayer 

 was heard (p. 53). Like Zeus, he sometimes was attracted 

 by mortal women, and to obtain the lady vv-ho ultimately 

 became his wife he sent down first thunder and storm, 

 then lightning and darkness and deluging rain, and, last 

 of all, a net in which he succeeded in catching her 

 (p. 232). 



The souls of dead Samoans started for Pulotu, the 

 spirit-world, through two circular holes near the beach, 

 the larger hole being for the souls of chiefs, and the 

 lesser for those of commoners. They went under the 

 sea till they came to a land where all things were very 

 much as they had been on earth. Chiefs looked forward 

 with pride to the use of their bodies as pillars in the 

 house of the Samoan Pluto (p. 260). 



In the Tongan Islands there was the same belief in 

 Boluto as the future world ; and Dr. Turner's work is 

 suggestive at every turn of comparisons with the beliefs 

 or customs of remote parts of the world. The Samoan ~ 

 story of the origin of tattooing, turning on a mistake in 

 the delivery of a message (p. 55), recalls the Kaffir and 

 Hottentot account of the origin of human mortality. The 

 story of the turtle and the fowl (p. 218) points the same 

 moral as the classical fable of the tortoise and the hare. 

 The story of the woman and her child who were taken 

 up to the moon, where they may still be seen (p. 203), is 

 precisely similar to the moon myths of European folk- 

 lore. The custom of artificially flattening the heads of 

 children (p. 80) connects the Samoans in habit with the 

 American tribe who, for doing the same thing, were called 

 the Flathead Indians. 



With regard to Samoan customs generally the most 

 interesting allusions in Dr. Turner's work are to the 

 mock burnt-offerings, when for some offence against the 

 gods a man would undergo a counterfeit process of baking 

 in a cold oven (pp. 32, 69) ; to the ordeals for the detec- 

 tion of theft (pp. 19, 1S4) ; to imprecations by taboo, as 

 when the fear of a shark was instilled into a thief by the 

 plaited figure of one (p. 1S6) ; to the confession of crimes 

 for the purpose of obtaining divine pardon (pp. 34, 40, 

 141); to purification before battle by sprinkling (p. 64). 

 It is perhaps to be regretted that in reference to the rules 

 of marriage the information vouchsafed by Dr. Turner 

 is not so full as on the preceding points : we are not 

 told whether the Samoans w-ere endogamous or exo- 

 gamous, nor to what extent purchase entered into 

 matrimony. 



