24 
puzzling or amusing to those newly arrived in the islands, and 
who may not have become accustomed to it. I remember the 
first time I noticed it I was riding a horse, and being met by 
a native he asked — “ Where are you two going V 3 a very ordi- 
nary mode of salutation to a person when on a journey. I at 
first thought he meant the question for me and my horse. But 
it was simply the dual of respect. 
The way in which landed property is held and transmitted 
among the people also indicates something above savagery. 
It is not unlike the tenure of such property by the Israelites 
under the Mosaic laws. All the land in the islands is divided 
amongst families. An individual does not own it ; but the 
members of the entire family have an equal right to its use ; 
the patriarch or recognised head of the family, however, alone 
properly exercising the right to dispose of it, or to assign the 
use of it for a time to persons outside that family. Thus the 
land is handed down through successive generations under 
the nominal control of the recognised head of the family or 
clan for the time being. I use the word clan here, because 
the word family, in our sense of the term, does not express its 
full meaning among these people. A family is not the husband 
and wife and their children ; but a whole clan, consisting of 
all the connections by blood and marriage. Each family or 
clan has a name, which is always borne by one of the oldest or 
most influential members, and the man who bears that name 
is the patriarch or head of the entire clan. 
During the past few years this custom has been consider- 
ably changed in Samoa, and some of the larger families are 
broken into several sections — the nominal head of each section 
bearing the family title with a second name for the sake of 
distinction. In this way the binominal system is growing. 
I believe these people once occupied a higher intellectual 
position than that they now occupy. They have most elaborate 
myths and songs — some poems being of considerable length, 
and I think superior in composition to anything the people 
were capable of at the time when Europeans first came into 
contact with them. The best of these songs and traditions 
are kept in Samoa in two forms — in prose and in poetry; and 
certain families are the recognised keepers of them. They 
were retained with great accuracy without being written — a 
father paying the greatest attention to teach them with verbal 
accuracy to his sons. The prose form of an important myth 
was not considered authoritative unless it agreed with the 
poetic form. 
All the Sawaiori people were navigators before they 
were discovered by Europeans. Their boats w^ere somewhat 
