50 THE SUBANU. 
the means of intercommunication were wholly blocked. Yet still the 
marsupials hopped like giant grasshoppers, a sight to attract any 
naturalist with the prospect of annexing to the name of the animal nov. 
gen.etnov.sp. But first to know the name. One may readily imagine 
the naturalist inquiring in some manner of broken English, for Beach- 
la-Mar was not for a generation to be invented, ‘“‘and now, my dear man, 
what may be the name of that most extraordinary animal?’ ‘To which 
the answer Ka anguru. And by others confirmed on repeated ques- 
tioning, Ka anguru. ‘Thence comes into our languages kangaroo. It 
is only long afterward, when men have settled the Australian wild and 
some knowledge of the speech is acquired, that it is learned that the 
answer was no name at all, but simply “I do not understand.” 
Very similar to the instance of the kangaroo is an item in the 
Subanu material which I have been elaborating. In one of the manu- 
scripts which have come to me (3-0) is the entry: 
bicho a small grub or insect mananap nong mica daay ngalan. 
It is only when the language is worked out that we find even this 
scanty vocabulary quite sufficient to show us that the Subanu words 
mean only “‘animal without a name.” 
Elsewhere in my studies upon the primitive languages of the Pacific 
(The Polynesian Wanderings, page 365, and with greater fulness in 
Easter Island, page 166), I have remarked upon another pitfall of the 
vocabulary. ‘This was the case of the acquisition of the numerals by 
means of the finger count. It was shown that (by reason of the fact 
that we are in the habit of counting the fingers which we stick up to 
view and that several savage races count the fingers which are flexed 
upon the palm) it has more than once happened that early collectors of 
speech have inverted the order of the first four numerals and have reg- 
istered the further note that the savages under their examination were 
found unable to count as high as five. 
Here, too, belongs the story of the Island of Yesindeed. ‘Three 
names of Huropean shipmen are associated with the discovery of Samoa. 
The first was Roggeveen, who happened upon the group in 1722 and 
conferred upon ‘Upolu a name out of the United Netherlands. Second 
came Bougainville in 1768 and designated the archipelago the Iles des 
Navigateurs. In1787,LaPérouse entered the group from the eastward 
and found no difficulty in obtaining the name of Manu‘a. When he 
reached Tutuila he was misled by the name Maunga, which is titular for 
the chief of Pagopago, or else by the same word used as a common noun 
to designate a mountain, for he charted the island as Maouna. Stretch- 
ing westward across the strait which now parts German from American 
Samoa, he named ‘Upolu Oyolava, a name which has not entirely dis- 
appeared from the charts and which commonly persists on the larger 
globes, cartographic material less frequently subject to revision. We 
