INDONESIAN ANNOTATIONS ON THE VOCABULARY. 141 
extreme eastern limit of Polynesian settlement. In Easter Island, 
the ultimate of the Polynesian movement eastward, I find the arrow 
designated by vero, but as that word in general means a spear or 
lance, that is, properly a pointed weapon of offense which may be 
thrust forward but retained in the hand as a lance or may be cast as 
a missile spear, and since the word for bow is missing and there is 
found no such word as fana which elsewhere designates the shooting 
of the arrow, this incomplete record may be neglected. ‘The fillet is 
one of the obvious conveniences of life when the hair is worn long 
and on that account it is misleading as a culture character. 
In connection with the secret societies of Melanesia it is clear that 
the fillet has some ritual value. Dr. Rivers (History of Melanesian 
Society, 446) writes: “‘It is possible that the fillet of the Banks and 
Tikopia is a survival of such an elaborate head covering (the caps of 
the terminalia statues of Easter Island), in which case we should 
have another link between the ritual of secret societies and megalithic 
monuments.’ It is a far cry from a mere hair snood to a high hat, 
and when we carry it beyond to the megalithic monuments of the 
Pacific we stray in a mist of conjecture. The cycas is physically 
present in the vegetable kingdom of Polynesia; it has its textile use; 
but nowhere do we find any ritual connotation of any sort and even 
in Melanesia such connotation is narrowly restricted to a single group 
of secret societies. 
We now recur to a consideration of the spread of the two culture 
objects which have prompted this long and intricate excursus, the 
betel and the kava. Our culture chart presents to the eye the prin- 
cipal areas of each of these cultures, the point of overlapping and 
slightly of intermingling lies in the central region of Melanesia. 
Sirih-chewing has a wide rearward extent. We can find it on the 
Asiatic continent in India; it covers the whole of Indonesia; it extends 
eastward in Melanesia along the Solomon Islands, with a small area 
at the south as yet unoccupied; it has made in Tikopia at least one 
inclusion of Polynesian people. The impression which we obtain 
from the study of the chart, from our own acquaintance of the move- 
ment forward in the Solomons to communities which within the 
memory of men had not yet acquired the habit, is of a custom which 
is steadily progressing. Because it comes later in the known path 
of migration, because in the vital instance of Tikopia we see it ousting 
the former kava custom, we look upon it as a modern habit, relatively, 
_ that is, to the great Polynesian migration swarming. The kava cul- 
ture area presents an entirely different picture. Its intensity is 
deepest at the forward edge of movement; its rearward edge shows 
ragged persistence in the Melanesian area over which the migration 
has passed; we find in Tikopia a survival yielding before the advance 
of sirih-chewing; we find another such survival in Matankor of the 
