The Mafulu | Page 4

and British New
Guinea, and this time achieved success; the book which he now offers
to the public is the result of this plucky enterprise. In justice to the
author it should be known that, owing to climatic and other conditions,
he was unwell during the whole of his time in New Guinea, and had an
injured foot and leg that hurt him every step he took. The only wonder
is that he was able to accomplish so large and so thorough a piece of
work as he has done.
It is interesting to note the different ways by which various
investigators have entered the field of Ethnology. Some have
approached it from the literary or classical side, but very few indeed of
these have ever had any experience in the field. The majority of field
workers have had a previous training in science--zoology not
unnaturally has sent more recruits than any other branch of science. A
few students have been lawyers, but so far as I am aware Mr.
Williamson is the first British lawyer who has gone into the field, and
he has proved that legal training may be a very good preliminary
discipline for ethnological investigation in the field, as it gives

invaluable practice in the best methods of acquiring and sifting of
evidence. A lawyer must also necessarily have a wide knowledge of
human nature and an appreciation of varied ways of thought and action.
It was with such an equipment and fortified by extensive reading in
Ethnology, that Mr. Williamson was prepared for his self-imposed task.
Proof of his powers of observation will be found in the excellent
descriptions of objects of material culture with which he has presented
us.
I now turn to some of the scientific aspects of his book. Mr.
Williamson especially set before himself the work of investigating
some tribes in the mountainous hinterland of the Mekeo district. This
was a most happy selection, though no one could have foreseen the
especial interest of these people.
Thanks mainly to the systematic investigations of Dr. Seligmann and to
the sporadic observations of missionaries, government officials and
travellers, we have a good general knowledge of many of the peoples of
the eastern coast of the south-eastern peninsula of New Guinea, and of
some of the islands from the Trobriands to the Louisiades. The
Ethnology of the fertile and populous Mekeo district has been mainly
made known to us by the investigations of various members of the
Sacred Heart Mission, and by Dr. Seligmann. What little we know of
the Papuan Gulf district is due to missionaries among the coastal tribes,
Mr. James Chalmers and Mr. W. Holmes. Dr. G. Landtman is at
present investigating the natives of the delta of the Fly river and Daudai.
The natives of the Torres Straits islands have also been studied as fully
as is possible. But of the mountain region lying behind the Mekeo
district very little indeed has been published; so Mr. Williamson's book
fills a gap in our knowledge of Papuan ethnology.
We have as yet a very imperfect knowledge of the ethnological history
of New Guinea. Speaking very broadly, it is generally admitted that the
bulk of the population belongs to the Papuan race, a dark-skinned,
woolly-haired people who have also spread over western Oceania; but,
to a greater or less extent, New Guinea has been subject to cultural and
racial influences from all sides, except from Australia, where the

movement has been the other way. Thus the East Indian archipelago
has directly affected parts of Netherlands New Guinea, and its
influence is to be traced to a variable degree in localities in the
Bismarck archipelago, German New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelm's Land),
Western Oceania, and British New Guinea or Papua, as it is termed
officially.
The south-eastern peninsula of New Guinea--or at all events the coastal
regions--has been largely affected by immigrants, who were themselves
a mixed people, and who came later at various times. It is to these
immigrants that Mr. Ray and I applied the term Melanesian (Ray, S. H.,
and Haddon, A. C., "A Study of the Languages of Torres Straits," Proc.
Roy. Irish Acad., 3rd ser., IV., 1897, p. 509). Early in 1894, Mr. Ray
read a paper before the Anthropological Institute (Journ. Anth. Inst.,
XXIV., p. 15), in which he adhered to our former discrimination of two
linguistic stocks and added a third type of language composed of a
mixture of the other two, for which he proposed the name
Melano-Papuan. These languages, according to Mr. Ray, occur in the
Trobriands, Woodlarks and the Louisiades, and similar languages are
found in the northern Solomon Islands. For some years I had been
studying the decorative art of British New Guinea, and from physical
and artistic and other cultural reasons had come to