496 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1032 



in arts and crafts ; it is not so easy, it may 

 even be that it is impossible, to detect the 

 exact nature of these differences, espe- 

 cially in the matter of mental characters. 



As a rule the occupant of this presiden- 

 tial chair is one who, whether he has seen 

 much of "savages" at close quarters or 

 not, has had much ampler opportunity 

 than has fallen to my lot of comparative 

 study of that great mass of anthropological 

 observations which, gathered from almost 

 every part of the world, has now been 

 recorded at headquarters. I, on the other 

 hand, happen to have spent the better part 

 of my active life in two different parts of 

 the world, remote from books and men of 

 science, but in both of which folk of civil- 

 ized and of savage culture have been more 

 or less intermixed, but as yet very imper- 

 fectly combined, and in both of which I 

 have been brought into rather unusually 

 close and sympathetic contact with folk 

 who, whatever veneer of civilization may 

 have been put upon them, are in the 

 thoughts which lie at the back of their 

 minds and in character still almost as 

 when their ancestors were at the stage of 

 savage culture. 



"While trying to adjust the mutual rela- 

 tions of wild folk and of folk of civilized 

 stock, I have seen from close at hand the 

 clash which is inevitable when the two meet 

 — a clash which is naturally all the greater 

 when the meeting is sudden. Moreover, 

 having started with a strong taste for 

 natural history, and especially for the 

 natural history of man, and having had 

 much guidance from many anthropological 

 friends and from books, I have perhaps 

 been especially fortunate in opportunity 

 for studying the more natural human ani- 

 mal at close quarters and in his natural 

 surroundings. I have tried, from as ab- 

 stract and 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 civil- 

 ized folk first found him and, at first with- 

 out 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 primitive 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 men- 

 tality 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 con- 

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

 folk, and later with civilized 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 ex- 

 planation of certain of their manners and 

 customs for which it is otherwise hard to 

 account. 



The attainment of some such under- 

 standing 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 



