CHAPTER IV. 
MELANESIAN ANNOTATIONS ON THE VOCABULARY. 
In the foregoing chapter we have assembled a word-list of this 
ultimate western folk of the German province of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. 
It is very brief. From it we can obtain no impression of the manner 
in which word follows word for the expression of the intellectual idea. 
It is so scanty that it will little forward the next comer to that remote 
lagoon. Yet it is not without its value. The objects which have 
passed under linguistic review are for the greater part physical entities; 
they are among the first vocables which the inquirer into new speech 
will seek to ascertain, for they are the parts of the body as to which 
the least doubt of interpretation may subsist; they are the artifacts 
most frequently met with in all savage communities. Accordingly, 
despite their scantiness, these are the words for which we shall find 
the widest range of comparable material over the greatest geogra- 
phical extent. | 
Not because things are small should we despise them. It were greatly 
to be desired that in this word-list we should find more vocables which 
may be referred to the stock of some 250 words in this broad area 
which are critical of language affinities. How few are referable to 
that stock we shall see in this annotation, picking each out one by one 
as we encounter it in following out the alphabetization in which the 
vocabulary has just been presented. Yet each unit is found to be of 
the highest importance when its affiliations in other languages add 
instance after instance of its employment by the dozen, by the score, 
to the hundred mark, and in some cases even beyond. 
In this chapter we shall confine our associations of these vocables 
to the affiliations recognized in lands which lie eastward and south- 
ward from the Arop-Sissano lagoons—eastward over the extent of 
thousands of miles of ocean sparsely dotted with the island homes of 
men, southward after an interval which is blanked by the rugged 
mountainous interior of New Guinea, as to which we lack all informa- 
tion which might bear upon the study of its inhabitants. Because 
I feel that not on the existing scanty material are we justified in assum- 
ing as proved the classification of the island languages into families, 
I must set down a note as to the subdivision of this eastward and south- 
ward material, reserving the discussion of the arguments involved 
until the conclusion of this assemblage of pertinent material. 
We find the languages of New Guinea assigned to position as Papuan 
or Melanesian. From the Bismarck Archipelago to New Caledonia 
and Fiji the term Melanesian is employed with the character of a 
language family. Eastward from Fiji to Eater Islands, northward to 
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