MIGRATION DRIFT AND ERRATICS. 159 
mortised socket engaging with the blade and with the shaft; in the 
interpretation of the structure typed in the Fijian axe-bit we are led 
to the discovery of a similar doubly mortised socket engaging with 
blade and shaft. For this device we have no knowledge of any other 
habitat. Therefore we arrive at the conclusion that Moanus and 
Fijians have derived this interesting device from a common culture 
source. It is impossible to venture further and to suggest a Fijian 
or a Moanus source of the device, for the movements of migration 
which have affected the Melanesian races are yet to discover. In 
another work we have investigated the occurrence in Matankor of the 
Admiralty Islands of the custom of the kava (Sissano, 135), and this 
distant locus of a custom of such high development in Fiji is certainly 
of the utmost importance. At the same time we must note the lin- 
guistic record of the Moénus (The Polynesian Wanderings, 147) as 
exhibiting very strong traces of Polynesian speech. Speech and kava 
may establish Moanus as a halting-place of wandering Proto-Samoans; 
the axe-bit, restricted to the Melanesian culture element in Nuclear 
Polynesia, is evidential of distinctively Melanesian association. 
The next critical character is the wooden metamorph of the stone 
head in such clubs as we have here assembled under the designations 
of ula, mace, pandanus, and lipped. With the single exception of the 
mace, all these pertain to the Fijian culture element, while the dis- 
tinctively Polynesian types, such as the paddle and the /apalapa, are 
quite as clearly wooden weapons ab initio. In the case of the missile 
club, the mace, and the pandanus we have satisfactorily shown the 
evolution from a spherical or cylindrical head of stone, such as is found 
in New Britain and parts of northern Melanesia. In the case of the 
axe-bit and the lipped club we have established a source in the stone 
blade mounted as an axe, and this mounting can be identified in 
northern Melanesia and nowhere else in the Pacific. ‘Therefore these 
characters point in the same direction as does the socket element. 
Ancestors of the Fijians must have been in contact with the culture 
which has given the peoples of the Bismarck Archipelago the stone 
blade or the shell blade mounted with its cutting-edge parallel with 
the shaft as distinct from the adze mount which characterizes southern 
Melanesia and all of Polynesia so far as records extend. 
A critical character, singular in that it affects true Polynesians and 
not the Fijians of Nuclear Polynesia, is the sickle type of wooden club 
in Niué, found in no other island of the province nor elsewhere in Poly- 
nesian culture. Here are found two important details in one weapon— 
the sickle blade and the cone ornament at the end of the handle. Each 
is identified in the Buka culture of the northern Solomon Islands. The 
former instances have established some remote community of culture 
for the Fijian and certain of the Melanesians; the latter is to be read as 
evidential that the Proto-Samoan ancestors of Niué made such sojourn 
