NAMES OF VITTAJST PALMS. 289 



The differentiation of the names both in number and complexity is 

 from east to west, and in the Viti (Fiji) Islands we have an additional 

 indication that the people who brought the name had been acquainted 

 with the cocoanut before they met with the several other species of 

 palms indigenous in that group of islands. This is inferred from the 

 fact that although the name nia applies especially to the nut rather 

 than to the tree among the Polynesians, it is used by the Melanesians 

 of Viti as a generic term to include all the local palms. The tendency 

 of primitive races generally is to have separate names not only for 

 each species, but for varieties and parts of useful plants, and accord- 

 ing to Seeman the Fijians are "the only people who in their barba- 

 rous state had a collective term for the palms." But that the name 

 elsewhere applied only to the cocoanut was employed for this generic 

 use can scarcely mean anj^thing else than that the cocoanut was known 

 and named before the other Vitian palms were encountered. For if 

 we think of the original Vitians as aboriginals of their own islands 

 they should be expected to have had separate names for their palms as 

 for other indigenous plants, and the cocoanut, if introduced by natural 

 or accidental means, would, at the most, have received the name of one 

 of the native species. But that the palms of Viti should all be desig- 

 nated as different kinds of niu or cocoanuts can scarcely be inter- 

 preted in connection with the general distribution of that name except 

 as indicating that the people who brought the name niu to Viti were 

 alread}^ familiar with the cocoanut, but had not come in contact or, at 

 least, had not given names to other Pacific palms until they reached 

 Viti, where the Malayan palm flora begins to make its appearance. In 

 Samoa, the first archipelago to the east of Viti, where the name niu 

 is also used for the cocoanut, there are only two indigenous palms, and 

 these are apparently so rare and unimportant that they have received 

 no native names. 1 In Viti, however, Seeman found twelve indigenous 

 palms, several of which grow at comparatively low elevations and are 

 used for timber and other economic purposes. There is even a native 

 sago palm, Sagus vitiensis, but this was also called niu {niu soria), a 

 fact further at variance with the idea of an emigration from the Malay 

 Archipelago, where the sago palm furnishes so important an article of 

 diet. Strangely enough, Seeman found on one of the Viti islands 

 another name, sogo or songo, evidently contributed by the Melanesian 

 or Papuan constituent of the population of Fiji, but as a name merely, 

 the art of extracting sago being unknown in Fiji until taught by 

 Seeman. 



These facts taken together seem to furnish the hitherto missing clue 

 to the origin and direction of the migration of the race which brought 

 the Malayo-Polynesian language, the cocoanut, the sw r eet potato, the 

 yams, and other American food plants into the Pacific; the race which 



iReinecke, Die Flora der Samoa-Insel, in Engler's Bot. Jahrb., 25, p. 588 (1898). 



