2 SISSANO. 
of SS which lord mayors wear in London at Guildhall dinners, all of 
Indonesia, all of Melanesia, all of Polynesia, all of Micronesia, the 
grand divisions which now are found better to serve our purpose and 
which have generally cast old Océanica into the storehouse of waste 
timber of geography. ‘Two of these oceanic divisions have been very 
satisfactorily studied. In Indonesia we have reasonably complete 
acquaintance with a dominant race which shows considerable uni- 
formity throughout its subdivisions. In Polynesia we find the same 
condition. In each area we discover certain contamination elements 
which offer but slight problems to the ethnologist; as between the 
two areas we find a thread of union by which the older students of 
systematic ethnology were led into error, but which we now employ 
as a valuable clue for our guidance through the maze of a folk-move- 
ment for which we have no documents. Micronesia has its own set 
of problems, very interesting and seemingly very intricate when we 
pass beyond the thread of Polynesia and Indonesia; but the equa- 
torial groups of sun-baked islands are not to engage our attention in 
the present studies. 
Melanesia, with which we are to deal, lies between Indonesia and 
Polynesia. Either it connects or it parts those two of the four great 
oceanic divisions which we have indicated as set upon a satisfactory 
basis of knowledge. Upon the charts it is seen to begin at or in the 
vicinity of New Guinea; its southern point is at the Isle of Pines, 
lying in the New Caledonian complex; its eastern limit is in Fiji. It 
is subdivided, not ethnically but rather as a result of the slow progress 
of discovery, into the Fiji Islands, New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, 
the New Hebrides, the Santa Cruz Group, the Solomons, the Bismarck 
Archipelago, the Admiralty Islands. 
It is important that we fix in mind what is the present stage of our 
information as to Melanesia, for when we refer to Melanesia in our 
studies and use the descriptive adjective Melanesian it is essential 
that we have a full appreciation of what its connotation really is. The 
fact that all these names of the grand divisions of Oceanica are formed 
on the same model, that they come into mind almost as a paradigm 
of a single stem, makes it particularly important that we shall inform 
ourselves as to whether Melanesia and Melanesian really carry the 
same weight of meaning as Indonesia and Polynesia, as Indonesian 
and Polynesian. 
Geographically we are well informed upon Melanesia. Its dis- 
covery history is as good as that of Polynesia. All the great adven- 
turers of the Pacific have included the two in their explorations of the 
South Sea. We have the records of Quiros and Mendafia, of Cook, 
of Bougainville, of Dumont d’Urville, and it is within this area that 
La Pérouse met his fate. In more recent years, since Wilkes set the 
pace in his masterly mapping of Fiji and its reefs, the navies of Ger- 
