50 i 



SCIENCE 



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



ing of white men was very different, and, 

 from the Fijian point of view — if I may 

 say so without fear of being misunderstood 

 — ^not altogether indefensible. It must be 

 remembered that there was, as it were, no 

 killing in our sense of the word involved, 

 merely a setting free from the non-essen- 

 tial body of the essential soul, which soul 

 survived just as well without the body as 

 with it. 



Note that the soul must have been con- 

 sidered as in some way and for a time still 

 associated with its late body if, as is com- 

 monly and perhaps rightly held, the slayer 

 sometimes ate some part of the body of the 

 slain in order to acquire some of the qual- 

 ities of the slain. 



Again, there can be little doubt that men 

 were sometimes killed for sacrificial pur- 

 poses, the material bodies of the victims 

 heing placed at some spot (perhaps the 

 tomb) considered to be frequented by the 

 disembodied spirit of some ancestor for 

 whom it was desired to provide a spirit at- 

 tendant. It may be noted that this sacrifi- 

 cial use of the body might be combined with 

 an eating of the same body when once it 

 had served its first purpose of attributing 

 the spirit which had been in it to the serv- 

 ice of the honored ancestor. 



It has been laid to the charge of the 

 Fijians (as to that of many other folk of 

 savage and even of civilized culture) that 

 they habitually killed strangers, especially 

 such as had been washed or drifted to the 

 islands by the sea — who, in early times at 

 least, must have been almost the only 

 strangers to arrive. The charge, like that 

 of cannibalism, has been exaggerated, and 

 the facts — as far as there were any — on 

 which this charge was founded have been 

 misunderstood. 



Here, again, the attitude of the Fijian in 

 this respect was hardly different from that 

 of the lower animals under similar circum- 



stances. The Fijian knew of no reason to 

 be glad of the arrival of strangers, unless 

 these could, in one way or another, be 

 useful to him; and, as has already been 

 explained, he knew of no reason why he 

 should not make the best use possible of 

 the stranger, of his body or his spirit, sep- 

 arately or together. 



While, as must have been the case in earlier 

 times, the new-comers were dark-skinned 

 men like himself, the Fijian might with- 

 out the slightest prick of conscience sepa- 

 rate their bodies from their spirits, and 

 dispose of the body or the spirit separately; 

 or without effecting this separation, he 

 might simply enslave the new-comers; or, 

 again, if he suspected that the new-comers 

 were too strong for him, he might yield 

 himself to them as a slave. 



And later, when Europeans began to ar- 

 rive, sometimes as refugees from passing 

 ships and sometimes as survivors from 

 ships wrecked on the surrounding reefs, 

 the bearing of the Fijian towards this new 

 kind of stranger would have been on the 

 same principles, only that in this case the 

 new-comers, being of far less readily 

 understood kind, would be regarded with 

 more suspicion and also more respect. I 

 believe that very seldom, if ever, was an 

 inoffensive white man, wrecked sailor or 

 other, killed, or treated with anything but 

 kindliness and courtesy, even though the 

 wrecked man's property might naturally 

 be appropriated by the natives. It was 

 only when white-skinned strangers became 

 commoner, and frequently more offensive, 

 and when familiarity had bred contempt, 

 that they were killed, as nuisances, and, 

 especially during the great outbreak of 

 cannibalism, were eaten. 



This point in the bearing of the islanders 

 to white men might be further illustrated 

 by a circumstance which, to my surprise, I 

 have never found mentioned, i. e., that 



