88 
The possibility that bad weather may interfere with our landing 
on Tikopia, and especially on Anuta, has me worried, for Anuta is the 
primary goal of this entire expedition and I want to do our most thorough 
work there. 
Yesterday, at the Santa Cruz hospital, the thirteen year old Tikopian 
boy, Falos Manuvak, was a very fascinatfng child. He has recovered from 
what appears to have been tuberculous meningitis, but the diagnosis was 
never been proved. Now out of coma, he is said to be well by Dr. Lee 
ind his parents, but this can hardly be the case. He is dull of expression, 
very slow speech and slow to respond, and has "many signs that indicate 
mental impaiirment. He engages in extreme echopraxia, and ecoholalia to 
a slight degree. He smiles, rubs noses, hold hands, twitches and grins 
after a brief delay in direct response to what I do. Like most Poly- 
nesian youngsters he loves to embrace and fondle, but excessively so, 
I believe, pathologically so. He hugs my thighs, pats and rubs my arms 
and tries to be excessively affectionate. He is not markedly demented, 
to be sure, for he quickly corrects my Tnispronunciation of his father’s name — 
but in so doing he does so repetitively. Thus, I suspect a real cerebral de- 
ficit, residual to his now apparently cured meningitis . His father is here with 
him, a known pulmonary tuberculosis patient under therapy. His younger sister 
and his mother are also here. Falos also shows an extraordinary flattened 
occiput, with a craniotabes-like appearance. The same odd skull shape 
is extreme in his mother, and present but less extreme in the sister and 
father. This is not an uncommon oddity of skulls among Tikoplans, I be- 
lieve, and we will have to devise some way of demonstrating it clearly, 
perhaps quantitatively. It may be difficult to do so. It is not a 
subtle or minimal anomaly, but a very marked and flagrantly different 
skull shape than we see in other Islanders in the Banks and Torres, and 
Solomon Islands.' 
Lawrence Faiyoa and Sarah Manuvaimuno, Falos' father and mother, 
are both beautifully and extensively tattooed. When I take blood from 
them all, Falos cried with his and was only slowly soothed. Among over 
1500 bleedings, no one over eight has cried in the Banks and 
Torres Islands that I recall, and certainly no boy of ten or older. Yet 
the first teenage Polynesian boy I bleed cries... how typical! The ex- 
treme differences in personality, physique and behavior of the two races 
iS again dramatically seen in the British Solomon Islands hospital, as 
it is in Honiara, where one can see both races side by side. The more 
emotional, more sensitive, less pain- tolerant , and more hypochondriacal 
Polynesians stand out in sharp contrast to the darker more stoical Melanesians. 
The warm cuddling, messaging behavior of Falos is distinctly Polynesian, 
although in his case I am forced to consider it somewhat pathological and 
the result of brain injury from his recent tuberculous meningitis. It 
would be fine to know his mental status before the illness, but of that 
I can learn nothing from his parents. They consider him normal as of now, as 
far as I can acertaln. When Falos clung to me too tightly, when he 
joked in an echopraxic way a bit too much, as to be most rude from his father's 
point of view, his father chided him abruptly, but Falos paid little 
attention to these admonitions. The admonitions were far more character- 
istic of Polynesians with their children, than most Melanesians who would 
have corrected or spoken less to the child and left the matter more , in my hands. 
