140 SISSANO. 
nesian culture possesses of these the kava, in greater extent and 
involving more formal courtesy but completely lacking the ritual 
character observed in parts of its Melanesian occurrence. It has the 
pig, but merely as a food article; in parts of Polynesia, e. g., Samoa, 
there is a bad connotation and the name is indecorous and must be 
replaced by a periphrasis such as four-legged animal. It has the 
fowl, also as food and lacking position in the myths, except that in 
Samoa a probably modern and quite etiological myth attempts to 
explain the obvious and misleading Sa-moa as the place of hens. It 
has the wooden gong in two forms varying in size, one portable by 
hand, the other requiring a rest upon logs on the town green, each form 
being of the same type of a hollowed piece of hard wood resonant under 
percussion. It has the conch shell pierced for use as a trumpet, but I 
have no knowledge of its employment for other than signal purposes. 
Shell money has no existence in any of the Polynesian settlements. 
I have used the monetary term which has come into use for conven- 
ience, but I do not assume here to come to a decision as to its cur- 
rency import. The resemblance between the diwarra, to employ one 
of the Melanesian names which has acquired some frequency of use, 
and the wampum of the eastern American Indians, particularly 
Iroquoian and by later extension Algonkian, is one of those obvious 
things which lead us into error. ‘The strings of light and dark disks 
of shell in the western Pacific look like the strings of light and dark 
shell which constituted the familiar wampum. Inasmuch as wampum 
was known as a currency medium, and to that extent a money, it 
was easy to apply to the Melanesian strings the designation shell- 
money. Professor Frank Gouldsmith Speck, of the Department of 
Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania, has established 
(lecture yet unpublished) that the currency employment of wampum 
is of extremely late development and that it was not Indian in origin, 
but was engrafted upon the ceremonial and mnemonic use of the 
material by contact with the Dutch settlers of the New Netherlands. 
If, therefore, the currency value of the source of this suggestion is 
disposed of as an excrescence, we may remain in doubt as to the 
currency value of the Melanesian shell-money. In my acquaintance 
with the use of the strings of shell disks in Melanesia I have never 
been satisfied that they serve the end of a circulating medium or money 
of account. The bow and arrow is scarcely to be held critical of a 
distinction between Polynesians and Melanesians. It is clear that 
the Melanesians employ it as a weapon of offense; it is equally clear 
that its use is excessively rare in the regions of uncontaminated Poly- 
nesian culture. We find it in full use in Fiji; in Tonga it was employed 
in the purely aleatory sport of rat-shooting; in Samoa and Tahiti it 
was a toy; the same is true of bows reported by Schmelz from the 
Tuamotu and by Friederici from Mangareva, both almost at the 
