THE PACIFIC.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 213, 8 September 1923, Page 11

THE PACIFIC.

MIGRATIONS OF PEOPLES. LECTURE BY BR. HABBON. EGYPT THE ULTIMATE ORIGIN. An interesting lecture on "Migrations of Pedples in the South-west Pacific ' was delivered by Dr. A. C. Haddon during the session of the Science Congress in Sydney. Professor Sir Edgworth David, who presided, said that Dr. Haddon had spent many years of his life in personal exploration, enduring great hardships, amongst the races of the Pacific. He was the professor of ethnology at the University at Cambridge, and was considered as being a world-wide authority on this subject. They could not but recognise that they were personally responsible for their undertaking in connection with Papua and the mandated territories to see that the native races were made as happy and as comfortable as was possible. In this connection the Federal Medical Officer (Dr. Cumpston) had stated that with an expenditure, extended over a period of five years, of one-fifth of the cost of a modern battleship, science could clear the Pacific of practically all its chief tropical diseases, which brought bo much misery and disI tress to the native races. In the interests of humanity, it was up to them to pee that this money was forthcoming. (Applause) Dr. Haddon said that all the oldest people in the southern part of the world were dark-skinned, woolly-haired folk, Usually with long, narrow heads, always witli very broad noses, and often with projecting jaws. Of these there were two main varieties —one of pigmy stature and the other taller —and they were found in Africa and in the Indo-Pacific area. After dealing with the entrance into Australia of the pre-Dravidian race, Dr. Haddon went on to say that very much later a series of migrations spread in a south-easterly direction from the East Indian archipelago. The first brought with them a high culture, for they wore tillers of the soil, and possessed a new language. They were seafarers, and engaged in voyages into the Western Pacific. Other migrations which followed included the kava drinkers —a beverage made from the root of the pepper tree—and the betel-nut chewers. The latest theory was that all the various cultures owed their origin to an archaic civilisation that spread immediately from Indonesia into the Pacific. It was postulated that before the coming of tlie hearers of this civilisation the original inhabitants were mere collectors of food, and had but a rudimentary culture. The civilisation was mainly characterised by the erection of stone monuments of various types. They had a sun cult: the upper classes claimed to 1« the children of the sun, and the more important were sacred kiues. They practised mummification. They were horticulturists, and introduced irrigation and many other elements of culture. This civilisation, which could I* traced in Indonesia, did not originate there, and evidently had been adduced to show that we might look to Ancient Kgypt for its ultimate origin. The Rev. Dr. C. E. Fox hud found in San Cristoval. in the Solomons, tombs of the shape of a truncated pryamid, with a central vertical shaft n nil a recess at the bottom for a mummified corpse. On the top was a dolmen (a flat stone supported by several others), within which was a stone figure of a man, which represented the dead man himself. The parallelism of this to the custom of the ancient Efryptians of the nvramid age was decidedly uncanny. Dolmens, associated with funerary rites, us in India, and anciently in Western Europe, occurred in the New Hebrides, especially in Malekula. The exact way in which these and other customs reached Melanesia was at present obscure, but a rreat deal of exciting information was constantly coming to lieht, and it was evident that they had only just! begun to annreciate th<» extreme complexity of the rv o t>'ems of the human occupation of the Pacific.