THE PACIFIC

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVIII, Issue 55, 3 November 1915, Page 4

THE PACIFIC

Professor .Macmillan Rrown oi Christohurch has been delivering sume interesting addresses on the piobhms oi' I he Pacific ami in one delivered a low- days ago dealt with man's entry into the. hinds of the P u-iiie. The Professor's point of view appears to he thai the whole of the natural conditions were againsl the ••ommon ee ceptance that the population of Polynesia came from the Malay Archipelago. Me showed bow with a stretch of thousands of miles of open ocean the trade winds wore wholly againsl such an immigration; they blow from the south-east am) north-west for fully eight or nine months of the year, and the other three or four months the wind is shifty, but hugely from the north-west and west, and changes from calms to evclones with rapidity, making the conditions exceedingly adverse to any such supposed immigration. Professor Brown also says that if the Polynesians came out of

the Malay Archipelago one would expert lo find that the "pi.ui" large houschoat) had left its mark all .alongi the way. but that was not the ca e, and tlii' only clumsy approach to a houseboat of tlie pruu type was-'foundi at Motu, in British New Guinea. This was the "latakoi," made of.three or lour large dug-outs. The only really seaworthy craft found in Polynesia wa s the double canoe, which was called "wharau." The speaker traced the habitat, so to speak, of this large, canoe among the different islands, and showed that the word "wharau" might easily be transposed into prau. Touching upon the facts that might be deducted from the culture of the Pacific peoples, culture including the material, .social, and spiritual customs, Professor Brown had recourse to a recent work by Dr. Rivers, of Cambridge, wherein lie drew a line of distinction between the kava-drinking people, and said lie did not agree with all the deductions made by Dr. Rivers as to two distinct immigrations having taken place, nor with the assumption that the kava people came first and the betel-chewers next. Discussing the question of foodstuffs, it was shown that the foods of Polynesia were distributed all through Melanesia, but rice and sago, the staple foods of the Malay Archipelago, had never got beyond the archipelago. This he considered a very strong argument against the presumed eastward ' immigration from Malaysia to Polynesia.