174 LINGUISTICS IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC. 
From this table it will be seen that much translation yet remains to 
be done. Florida, which is by far the most important language in the 
Solomons, has no complete New Testament. Dr. Codrington has 
included a small grammar of the Florida language in his “‘ Melanesian 
Languages,’ but naturally he was not able to do for it what he did for 
Mota and we still await a full grammar of the language. 
After sixty years of life, the Mission has only three complete New 
Testaments and only two dictionaries, including the present dictionary 
of Ulawa and Sa‘a. A grammar of Wango exists in manuscript. 
The paucity of grammars is much to be deplored. Sketches made by 
Dr. Codrington might conceivably have been filled up even if no new 
ones were made independently, but the grammars of Sa‘a, Ulawa, and 
Lau are the only ones that have been printed since Dr. Codrington’s 
great work containing grammars of 38 Melanesian languages was 
published in 1884. 
It would certainly be desirable to get native teachers to make 
initial translations of the Gospels through the medium of Mota or 
otherwise. The Mota New Testament, however, needs revising. It 
was reprinted a year or two ago from stereotype plates and a few 
of the printers’ errors were corrected, but the Society for the Promotion 
of Christian Knowledge would not allow any alterations that ran 
over two lines. 
Any translations made by natives would serve as a basis for future 
work by the missionaries themselves and would also provide gram- 
marians with valuable material for comparative study. Thus there 
seems to be no reason why in the case of the Tolo language, e¢. g., in 
Malaita, some of the teachers at Tawani‘ahi‘a on the west coast who 
know both Tolo and Sa‘a should not use the Sa‘a translation of the 
Gospels for work in their own language. Since Bishop Patteson’s 
time no further investigation has been made of the Tolo language, 
though it is an important language both on Malaita and also at Marau 
Sound on the south end of Guadalcanar. 
THE VALUE OF THE STUDY OF MELANESIAN LANGUAGES. 
The study of Melanesian languages is an absolute necessity for the 
elucidation of problems of language in the western Pacific, and one 
might go further and say that light had been thrown on languages so 
far away from Melanesia as Madagascar and Malay by the working 
out of the details of the grammars of the Melanesian languages. What 
a flood of interest is created by Dr. Codrington’s discovery of the 
identity of the Omba, New Hebrides, word heno and the Florida hanu 
with the Malagasy ano! In these three languages this word stands 
in place of a personal name, and the personal article is prefixed, so that 
1 heno, a hanu, 1 ano, are identical and mean “‘so-and-so.”” The two 
great Melanesian scholars, Bishop Patteson and Dr. Codrington, by 
