Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/90

68 and there cannot be any difference between this and his hereditary property. Gardens are all fenced. Fruit-trees planted on another man's land remain the property of the planter and his heirs. It is in the succession to a man's personal property that the rights of kinship assert themselves. On a man's death his sons distribute his pigs, money, and other possessions, among those of his waivung, a choice pig and a larger share of other things being given to the sister's son, because his special relationship is much regarded. A man, however, will make his will, expressing his wishes as to the disposition of his property before his death. The succession to property is a fruitful source of quarrels, and it is natural that opportunity should prevail over acknowledged right when the heirs are out of the way.

There appears upon the whole a remarkable tendency throughout these islands of Melanesia towards the substitution of a man's own children for his sister's children, and others of his kin, in succession to his property; and this appears to begin where the property is the produce of the man's own industry, with the assistance in most cases of his sons, as in gardens newly cleared from the forest, in his money, his pigs, and his canoes. The original right of a man's own kin, and especially his sister's sons, to be his heirs not only to the hereditary lands which have come down in the kin but to personal property, is yet strongly maintained, even at Lepers' Island, where the advance towards the patriarchal system has been so considerable. It is probable that even at Saa something still survives of what must have been the original custom of the ancestors of that people, as well as of the rest of the Melanesians. It is evident that the newer form of succession depends upon the assertion of paternity; and as it arises sometimes on the occupation of new ground, it may be thought to be strengthened by the formation of new settlements after the family has established itself within the kin.