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Popular Science Monthly

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to worship things above his acquisition, and thus rank is the more reverenced because respect for property is low. Even to-day there is something god-like in the presence of the high chiefs, and none will cross the shadow of the king's house. Even in war did a common man kill a chief he himself was killed by men of his own tribe. As it is with property so with relationships. The family ties seem loosened; every child has two sets of parents, the adopted and the real, and relationships founded upon adoption are more respected than the real. Rank descends mainly through the mother. The son of a high chief by a common woman is a low chief, or even a commoner, but the son of a chieftainess by a common man is a chief. Curiously, there are no words in Fijian which are the exact equivalent of widow and widower. In the Marshall group the chief is actually the husband of all the women of his tribe, and as Lorimer Fison has said in his "Tales from Old Fiji," their designation and understanding of relationships suggests that there was once a time when "all the women were the wives of every man, and all the men were the husbands of every woman," as indeed was almost the case in Tahiti at the time of Captain Cook's visit to this island. The social customs of Fiji are rarely peculiar to Fiji itself, but commonly show their relationship or identity with those of the Polynesians or Papuans. Curiously indeed, while the original stock of the Fijians was probably pure Papuan, their social and economic systems are now dominated by Polynesian ideas, and only among the mountain tribes do we find a clear expression of the crude Papuan systems of life and thought. This in itself shows that under stimulation the Fijians are capable of advancement in cultural ideals. This superposition of a Polynesian admixture upon a barbarous negroid stock may account for the anomalous character of the Fijians, for in the arts they equalled or in some things excelled the other island peoples of the Pacific, and some of their customs approached closely to the cultural level of the Polynesians, but in certain fundamental things they remained the most fiendish savages upon earth. Indeed we should expect that contact with a somewhat high culture would introduce new wants, and thus affect their arts more profoundly than their customs. In common with all primitive peoples, their names of men and women are descriptive of some peculiarity or circumstance associated with the person named. Indeed, names were often changed after important events in a person's life, thus our old friend Thakombau began life as Seru, then after the coup d'etat in which he slaughtered his father's enemies and reestablished Tanoa's rule in Mbau he was called Thakombau (evil to Mbau). At the time he also received another name Thikinovu (centipede) in allusion to his stealthiness in approaching to bite his enemy, but this designation, together with his "missionary" name "Ebenezer," did not survive the test of usage. Miss Gordon Cumming gives an interesting list of Fijian names translated into English. For women they were such as Spray of the Coral Reef, Queen of Parrot's Land, Queen of Strangers, Smooth Water, Wife of the Morning Star, Mother of Her Grandchildren, Ten Whale's Teeth, Mother of Cockroaches, Lady Nettle, Drinker of Blood, Waited For, Rose of Rewa, Lady Thakombau, Lady Flag, etc. The men's names were such as The Stone (eternal) God, Great Shark, Bad Earth, Bad Stranger, New Child, More Dead Man's Flesh, Abode of Treachery, Not Quite Cooked, Die Out of Doors, Empty Fire, Fire in the Bush, Eats Like a God, King of Gluttony, Ill Cooked, Dead Man, Revenge, etc. In the religion of a people we have the most reliable clue to the history of their progress in culture and intelligence, for religions even when unwritten are potent to conserve old conceptions, and thus their followers advance beyond them, as does the intelligence of the twentieth century look pityingly upon the conception of the cruel and jealous God of the Old Testament, whose praises are nevertheless still sung in every Christian church. Thus in Tahiti the people were not cannibals, but the gods still appeared in the forms of birds that fed upon the bodies of the sacrificed. The eye of the victim was, indeed, offered to the chief, who raised it to his lips but did not eat it. In Samoa also where the practice of cannabalism was very rare and indulged in only under great provocation, some of the gods remained cannibals, and the surest way of appeasing any god was to be laid upon the stones of a cold oven. In Tahiti and Samoa, while most of the gods were malevolent, a few were kindly disposed towards mortals; in Fiji, however, they were all dreaded as the most powerful, sordid, cruel and vicious cannibal ghosts that have ever been conjured into being in the realm of thought. All over the Pacific from New Zealand to Japan, and from New Guinea to Hawaii, ancestor-worship forms the backbone of every religion as clearly as it did in Greece or Rome. There are everywhere one or more very ancient gods who may always have existed and from whom all others are descended. Next in order of reverence, although not always in power, come their children, and finally the much more numerous grandchildren and remote descendants of these oldest and highest gods. Finally, after many generations, men of chieftain's rank were born to the gods. Thus a common man could never attain the rank of a high chief, for such were the descendants of the gods, while commoners were created out of other clay and designed to be servants to the chiefs. But the process of god-making did not end with the appearance of men, for great chiefs and warriors after death became kalou yalo, or spirits, and often remained upon earth a menace to the unwary who might offend them. Curiously, these deified mortals might suffer a second death which would result in their utter annihilation, and while in Fiji we heard a tale of an old chief who had met with the ghost of his dead enemy and had killed him for the second and last time; the club which served in this miraculous victory having been hung up in the Mbure as an object of veneration. Of a still lower order were the ghosts of common men or of animals, and most dreaded of all was the vengeful spirit of the

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