Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10. 31 



problem and the means of solving most of its difficulties 

 emerged. 



For Perry's work in this field, no less than for my 

 own, Rivers' illuminating and truly epoch-making re- 

 searches (64 to 70) have cleared the ground. Not only 

 has he removed from the path of investigators the 

 apparently insuperable obstacles to the demonstration of 

 the spread of cultures by showing how useful arts can be 

 lost (65) ; but he has analysed the social organisation of 

 Oceania in such a way that the various waves of immi- 

 gration into the Pacific can be identified and with cer- 

 tainty be referred back to Indonesia (69). Many other 

 scholars in the past have produced evidence (for example 

 2; 60; 61 and 98) to demonstrate that the Polynesians 

 came from Indonesia ; but Rivers analysed and defined 

 the characteristic features of several streams of culture 

 which flowed from Indonesia into the Pacific. Perry 

 undertook the task of tracing these peoples through the 

 Indonesian maze and pushing back their origins to India. 

 In the present communication I shall attempt to sketch 

 in broad outline the process of the gradual accumulation 

 in Egypt and the neighbourhood of the cultural outfit of 

 these great wanderers, and to follow them in their migra- 

 tions west, south and east from the place where their 

 curious assortment of customs and accomplishments 

 became fortuitously associated one with the other {Map 



id. 



I cannot claim that my colleagues in this campaign 

 against what seems to us to be the utterly mistaken pre- 

 cepts of modern ethnology see altogether eye to eye with 

 me. They have been dealing exclusively with more 

 primitive peoples amongst whom every new attainment, 

 in arts and crafts, in beliefs and social organisation, in 

 everything in fact that we regard as an element of civili- 



