Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/816

 8o2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Thus, while any owner of a cocoanut grove can raise a hope, its effects may be frustrated by paying twenty shell rings, no more and no less, to the proprietor. We are told of a certain native with decidedly capitalistic tendencies who once took advantage of the owner's absence to enter a cocoanut grove and with the aid of his numerous wives to rob it of several thousand nuts. All he paid the proprietor was the twenty rings which did not begin to cover the cost of the depredation.^- In Florida, in the old days before christianization, chiefs "used to hide their money and valuable property and tambu the place ; now, when the fear of the tambu is gone, the young people search for these hoards and take what they find."^^ In the Banks' Islands, another division of Melanesia, in addition to the solemn tapu there is a minor prohibition called soloi which appears to contain no direct reference to a supernatural sanction. A person of importance who had power through association with the spirits would "sepa- rate from common use, a path, trees, part of the sea-beach, a canoe, a fishing-net, and no one would be surprised if sickness fell at once upon anyone who should break the tapu. A person of no particular distinction would set his soloi before the trees or garden, the fruit of which he wished to preserve for some feast, and intruders would know at any rate that he carried his bow and arrows."^*

Throughout the Polynesian area where aboriginal society appears to have been involved in a perfect network of taboos, the system became a powerful means for strengthening the ties of private property. In New Zealand the kumara or sweet-potato patches were always protected by the signal of a taboo.-'* At Tahiti, where the custom was noticed seventy years ago, such a sign "is still respected, although the superstition on which its

" Somerville, op. cit., p. 388.

"R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians (Oxford, 1891), p. 63.

by Marillier, "Sur le caractere religieux du tabou M^lanesien," Biblioth^que de I' Scale des hautes etudes, sciences religieuses (Paris, 1896), VII, 68 ff.
 * Some additional illustrations of the property taboo in Melanesia are given

"Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (Phila- delphia, 1845), II, 384.