524. TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
were not eagerly consenting parties, to the use (cruel as it seems to us) made 
of their material bodies. Thus the widows were eager to be strangled, and 
often even helped to do the deed, in order that they—all that was essential of 
them, 7.e., their souls—should rejoin the deceased. Similarly those others who 
were killed on the occasion of the funeral were quite willing to give their 
bodies, which seemed of comparatively little importance, as ‘grass’ to be added 
to the cut fern and other soft material on which the body of the deceased chief 
was couched in the grave; and quite willingly the men told off for that purpose 
stepped down into the holes in which the house-posts were grounded, that they, 
or rather their bodies, might thereafter hold up the house, while their souls 
enjoyed life much as before but without the encumbrance of the body. Others 
again contentedly grew taro for the chiefs to eat, and carried it in when ripe, 
thinking it of little importance that their mere bodies might be eaten with the 
taro. 
In conclusion, having endeavoured to realise for myself, and to show you a 
glimpse, of the enormous, hardly conceivable difference in habit of thought, and 
consequently in character, which separates the savage from the civilised man, 
J will offer a suggestion which seems to me possibly the most important outcome 
of my personal experience, now closed, as an anthropological administrator in 
tropical places where Eastern and Western folk have met, and where the 
inevitable clash between the two has occurred. 
In such places and circumstances the result has too often been that sooner 
or later the weaker folk—those whose ancestors have been age-long ‘savages ’— 
have died out in the presence of those whose ancestors long ago turned from 
‘savagery’ to civilisation. This dying out of the weaker folk has happened even 
when the stronger people have done their best to avoid this extirpation. 
The real ultimate cause of ‘the decrease of natives’ when in contact with 
civilised folk lies, perhaps, in the difference in hereditary mentality—in the in- 
capacity of the ‘savage’ to take on civilisation quickly enough. However 
sedulously the missionary, the Government official, and others who take a real 
interest in so doing, may teach civilised precepts to the essential savage, the 
subject of this sedulous case—however advanced a savage culture he may have 
attained—will, at least for many generations, remain a savage, i.¢c., for just so 
long as he is under influence of the civilised teacher he may act on the utterly 
strange precepts taught him, but away from that influence he will act on his 
own hereditary instincts. 
The manner in which the native dies out—even when well looked after— 
varies. He may be killed out by some disease, perhaps trifling but new to him, 
with which he does not know how to cope, and with which—if he can avoid so 
doing—he simply will not cope in the ways which the civilised man would teach 
him; or he may be killed out by the well-meant but injudicious enforcement on 
him of some system of unaccustomed labour; or, again, he may die out because 
deprived of his former occupations (e.g., fighting and the gathering of just so 
much food as sufficed for him) and thus restricted to a merely vegetative exist- 
ence; or in many other more or less similar forms his extermination may come 
about. 
But all such effective causes are reducible to one, which is that he is not 
allowed to act on his own hereditary instincts, that he cannot at all times 
have, and often would not use, judicious and disinterested guidance from civilised 
folk, and that consequently he, the ‘savage,’ cannot and too often does not 
care to keep alive when in the presence of civilised folk. 
MELBOURNE. 
; FRIDAY, AUGUST 14. 
The following Papers were read :— 
1. The Origin and Spread of certain Customs and Inventions. 
By Professor G. Exutor Surry, M.A., M.D., F.R.S. 
After dealing with the evidence from the resemblances in the physical charac 
teristics of widely separated populations—such, for instance, as certain of the 
