SOLOMON ISLANDERS.

Evening Star, Issue 14636, 4 August 1911, Page 9

SOLOMON ISLANDERS.

STEADILY DYING OUT. Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyright. SYDNEY, August 4. (Received August 4, 9.10 a.m.) Professor M-acmillan Brown, in the course of an interview, stated that the natives of the Solomon Islands were steadily dying out. The only island on which they were increasing was Malaita, where they were still wild- As a result of the reduction in population there is not enough labor to go round the plantations, and in three or four years they will liave to import alien labor, probably from India. Li time the Solomons, like Fiji, will become a mere annex of India. The only thing to 6ave the islanders is for them to bo like the Maoris—viz., to abolish primeval communism and adopt steps against too great laxity and idleness. THEORIES OF ORIC4IN. SYDNEY, August 4. (Received August 4, at 10.50 a.m.) Professor Macmillan Brown is of opinion : that from the racial characterstics and lau- : guage of the Solomon Islanders they are a mixture of a great number of races. The nesroid races came to the islands probably during a geological period, when the process of earth elevation was going on, to they were ahle to travel almost the whole way across on dry land. Other waves of the Caucasian race, also from Southern Ada, afterwards swept down over the negroids. During tens of thousands of years these waves must have kept coming down. When Polynesia was ikst populated it may have been where the Atolls now ■were. They had been fairly broad and high islands through all human time, and these may have been gradually sinking. Hence came the practice of abortion and infanticide, and the knowledge of oceanic navigation As the land was sinking under them they were compelled to go somewhere.