Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/234

228 Apart from the work of Codrington and the special investigations of Parkinson, Danks, Fison, Von Pfeil and a few others, how little is known about the practises and beliefs of the varied natives of the Melanesian archipelago. Our knowledge of their physical characteristics is slight; we have collections of many of the objects they make, but of what they do and think our knowledge is as insufficient as it can well be.

The case is not so bad for Polynesia, but even then most of our information is scrappy and many branches of inquiry are practically untouched. Books of travel and missionary records afford ample testimony to the great change that has come over these people. Much is irrevocably lost; but if steps are taken without delay some facts of importance may yet be rescued.

What occurs with almost dramatic rapidity or thoroughness in islands takes place also on the lowland areas where the white man comes into close contact with native races. There are many tracts of Africa which are in need of immediate investigation by trained observers.

Fortunately there is no need to point the moral for North America; although much yet remains to be done, the American anthropologists have not neglected the indigenes whom their civilization is repressing. They, too, recognize that in most cases it is only the fragments of the past that they are able to recover. What they have accomplished has been due mainly to the wise liberality of public-spirited business men.

There is no need to continue, examples could be multiplied indefinitely; our scientific literature is full of laments of the insufficiency of our knowledge of almost every custom or belief in every part of the world. Untrained observers have imperfectly recorded events of which they generally knew little and cared less. Those who have traveled are in universal agreement as to the rapid change that everywhere is taking place, and yet many anthropologists are content to measure skulls or to describe specimens in museums!

A word of warning is not unnecessary. There is still a great danger that travelers will make it their first endeavor to amass extensive collections quite regardless of the fact that a sketch or a photograph of an object about which full particulars have been collected is of much greater scientific value than the possession of the object without the information. The rapid sweeping up of specimens from a locality does great harm to ethnology. As a rule only the makers of an object can give full details respecting it, and no traveler who is here to-day and gone to-morrow can get all the requisite information. This takes time and patience. The rapid collector may get some sort of a story with his specimen, but he has no time to check the information by appeal to other natives, no time to go over the details in order to see that he has