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Rh furnished the motive for the early world-wide wanderings. In Melanesia, so distant from the main centres of the world’s activity that it was rarely reached by outside influence, the Egyptian beliefs concerning the nature of the soul have been preserved with a high degree of faithfulness. In Indonesia, on the other hand, so much nearer to the sources of modern civilisation, the early belief has been overlaid by many later influences, and the idea originally introduced has been so modified as to produce the highly complex set of beliefs which are implied in the existing concept of soul-substance. Later movements carried this modified and developed concept to New Guinea but failed to reach Melanesia.

If further knowledge should support this hypothetical scheme, a remarkable consequence will follow, for which indeed we have already other evidence. This consequence is that if we wish to find ancient beliefs preserved with the greatest fidelity we have to go to such distant and isolated spots as the islands of Melanesia, where the simple mentality of the people leads them to accept without any great modification beliefs which take their fancy, while the absence or scarcity of later external influence prevents the modification, and even obliteration, of beliefs, which are always liable to occur among more sophisticated peoples and in regions more open to the play of external influence. We are led to the extraordinary and at first sight most improbable view that if we wish to obtain knowledge concerning the beliefs of the ancient world for which we have no literary evidence, we have to go, not to countries where the beliefs were held, not to regions adjoining them which have been the seats of later civilisations, but to such distant and savage peoples as the natives of the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides.