516 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
unprejudiced a point of view as possible, to understand 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 practically useful, especially if it proves 
possible to disentangle the more primitive ideas of such people from those which 
they subsequently absorbed by contact, 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 merely 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 
opportunity and more suitable 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 1513, 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 that 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 till 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 
sometimes 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 probably 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 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 sub- 
ject 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 Melanesians, 
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 occupa- 
tion of these islands, and only shortly before Europeans began to frequent them, 
several bodies of Polynesians, who had long been in occupation of the Friendly 
