INDONESIAN ANNOTATIONS ON THE VOCABULARY. 135 
Such enormous phonetic variation (as in the Banks Islands and the New 
Hebrides particularly) is very difficult to understand on any hypothesis other 
than that on which I am proceeding, according to which it would be the 
result of phonetic differences in the speech of the peoples who inhabited 
these islands before the arrival of the kava people. It is more difficult to 
say what may have been the influence of the betel people and other later 
comers into Melanesia. The languages spoken in the islands where the 
influence of the betel people has been especially strong are of the same 
general character as those of other parts of Melanesia. ‘The betel people 
must have had some effect on vocabulary, but the evidence for their influence 
seems to be so slight that this people probably furnish an example of the 
widely accepted principle that language follows the mother. It is probable 
that the betel men married women of the islands where they settled, and 
that their children adopted the languages of their mothers. This process 
would be the more natural if the language of the betel people did not differ 
very widely from that of the earlier immigrants. The existence of common 
elements in the use of kava and betel, in the cult of the dead and in the material 
culture, has led me to regard the kava and betel peoples as closely allied to 
one another, and the slight differences between the languages of places 
settled by the betel people and those they did not reach suggest that the 
languages of the kava and betel peoples did not differ in any fundamental 
respect from one another. (Vol. II, p. 470.) 
The chief material objects which I have been led to ascribe to the kava 
people are the following: kava, shell money, the pig and fowl, the bow and 
=a ogra gong, the conch shell, the fillet, and the cycas tree. (Vol. 
» P- 533. 
The plank built canoe (mon of New Ireland) seems to have been especially 
developed among the betel people. (Vol. II, p. 536.) 
It is probable that they (the Matankor of the Admiralty Islands) are 
representatives of a migration earlier than that of the betel people who 
seem so largely to have influenced the Modanus, and I propose now to consider 
how far there is any evidence which would lead us to identify their culture 
with that of the kava people. In entering upon this topic it will be natural 
to begin with kava drinking. This practice occurs in the Admiralty Islands, 
and as in other parts of Polynesia, its use has generally been ascribed to 
relatively recent Polynesian influence. ‘The juice of the root, however, is 
expressed between stones and is drunk by men, the mode of preparation 
being thus of a kind which I suppose to have been practiced by the kava 
people of Melanesia. If the practice was introduced from Polynesia it must 
have been at some remote time before chewing had become the Polynesian 
practice. According to Parkinson the method is like that of Ponape, so that 
relatively recent introduction from Micronesia must be regarded as a possi- 
bility, but it may be noted that the only place in the Admiralty Islands 
where we know definitely of the use of kava is Lou, which is one of the seats 
of the Matankor. ‘This suggests that there still lingers in this island one of 
the original customs of the kava people which has disappeared everywhere 
else in northern Melanesia. (Vol. II, p. 553.) 
Before entering upon the statement of the views upon the kava 
problem which have resulted from my own studies, it will be proper 
to comment on certain of the foregoing conclusions offered by our 
learned authority. 
In the Tanna method of preparation (p. 125) we find a difficulty 
of usage. After the method in use in all Polynesia and in Fiji it would 
