MYTHS AND SONGS "^JjMhSii^i^^ MYTHS AND SONGS FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC. — — —— — NEW BOOKS. THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD : A Simple Account of Man in Early Times. By Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. " Likely to prove acceptable to a large and growing class of readers."—PaH Mall Gazette. " The book is one which very young children could understand, and which grown- up persons may run through with pleasure and advantage." Spectator. " Its style is simply exquisite, and it is filled with most curious information."— Christian World. " I read your book with great pleasure. I have no doubt it will do good, and hope you will continue your work. Nothing spoils our temper so much as having to unlearn in youth, manhood, and even old age, so many things which we were taught as children. A book like yours will prepare a far better soil in the child's mind, and I was delighted to have it to read to my children." (Extract from a Letter from Professor JIax Mullek to the Author). THE CHILDHOOD OJ RELIGIONS : Including a Simple Account of the Birth and Growth of Myth.s and Legends. By Edwakd Clodd, F.R.A.S. Crown 8vo. 5s. " His language is simple, clear, and impressive. His faculty of disentangling complicated masses of detail, and compressing much information into small space, with such felicitous arrangement and expression as never to over-tax the attention or abate the interest of the reader, is very remarkable." Examiner. "The style is very charming. There is something in the author's enthusiasm, something in the pellucid simplicity of his easy prose, which beguiles the reader along." Academy. THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. By W. D. Whitney, Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology in Yale College, New Haven. Second Edition. 5s. " We commend Mr. Whitney's book os being a clear and concise summary of all that is known of the still infant Science of language." Hour. MISSIONARY LIFE IN THE SOUTHERN SEAS. By James Hutton. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 7s. Gd. This is an historical record of mission work by the labourers of all denominations in Tahiti—the Hervey, the Austral, the Samoa or Navigator's, the Sandwich, Friendly, and Fiji Islands, &c. " The narrative is calm, sensible, and manly, and preserves many interesting facts in a convenient shape." Literary Churchman. A YACHTING CRUISE IN THE SOUTH SEAS. By C. F. Wood. Demy 8vo., with six Photographic Illustrations. 7.«. Gd. The author has spent considerable time in Polynesia, and his work is a description of the islands and the manners and customs of the natives as they exist. Much that is interesting from a scientific and ethnological point of view will be found in the volume. MYTHS AND SONGS THE SOUTH PACIFIC. BY THE REV. WILLIAM WYATT GILL, B.A. OF THE LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY. WITH A PREFACE BY F. MAX MiJLLER, M.A., PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AT OXFORD; FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE. Henry S. King & Co., London. 1876. iTIie rights of translation and reproduction are resemed.) PREFACE Having expressed a strong desire that the collection of Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, which the Rev. W. Wyatt Gill brought home with him from Mangaia, should not be allowed to lie forgotten, or, like other valuable materials collected by hard- working missionaries, perish altogether, I could not well decline to state, in a few words, what I consider the real importance of this collection to be. I confess it seemed strange to me that its importance should be questioned. If new minerals, plants, or animals are discovered, if strange petrifactions are brought to light, if flints or other stone weapons are dredged up, or works of art disinterred, even if a hitherto unknown language is rendered accessible for the first time, no one, I think, who is acquainted with the scientific problems of our age, would ask what their importance consists in, or what they vi Pj'e/ace. are good for. Whether they are products of nature or works of man, if only there is no doubt as to their genuineness, they claim and most readily receive the attention, not only of the learned, but also of the intelligent public at large. Now, what are these Myths and Songs which Mr. W. W. Gill has brought home from Mangaia, but antiquities, preserved for hundreds, it may be for thousands of years, showing us, far better than any stone weapons or stone idols, the growth of the human mind during a period which, as yet, is full of the most perplexing problems to the psychologist, the historian, and the theologian ? The only hope of our ever unravelling the perplexities of that mythological period, or that mythopceic phase of the human intellect, lies in our gaining access to every kind of collateral evidence. We know that mythopoeic period among the Aryan and Semitic races, but we know it from a distance only, and where are we to look now for living myths and legends, except among those who still think and speak mythologically, who are, in fact, at the present moment what the Hindus were before the collection of their sacred hymns, and the Greeks long before the days of Homer ? To find ourselves among a people who really believe in gods and heroes and ancestral spirits, who still offer human sacrifices, who in some cases devour their human victims, or, at all events, burn the flesh of animals on their altars, trusting that the scent will be sweet to the nostrils of their gods, is as if the zoologist could spend a few days among the megatheria, Preface. vii or the botanist among the waving ferns of the forests, buried beneath our feet. So much is written just now, and has been written during the last fifty years, on human archaeology, on the growth and progress of the intellect, on the origin of religion, on the first beginnings of social institutions ; so many theories have been started, so many generalizations put forward with perfect confidence, that one might almost imagine that all the evidence was before us, and no more new light could be expected from anywhere. But the very contrary is the case. There are many regions still to be explored, there are many facts, now put forward as certain, which require the most careful inspection, and as we read again and again the minute descriptions of the journey which man is supposed to have made from station to station, from his childhood to his manhood, or, it may be, his old age, it is difficult to resist a feeling of amazement, and to suppress at almost every page the exclamation. Wait ! wait ! There are the two antagonistic schools, each holding its tenets with a kind of religious fervour—the one believing in a descending, the other in an ascending, development of the human race ; the one asserting that the history of the human mind begins of necessity with a state of purity and simplicity which gradually gives way to corruption, perversity, and savagery ; the other main- taining with equal confidence, that the first human beings could not have been more than one step above the animals, and that their whole history is one of progress towards higher perfection. With — vlil Preface. regard to the beginnings of religion, the one school holds to a primitive suspicion of something that is beyond—call it super- natural, transcendent, or divine. It considers a silent walking across thisy7?«/a* of life, with eyes fixed on high, as a more perfect realisation of primitive religion than singing of Vedic hymns, offer- of Jewish sacrifices, or the most elaborate creeds and articles. The other begins with the purely animal and passive nature of man, * "So, on the I2th of August, we made the steep ascent to the village of Namgea, and from there to a very unpleasant Jktila, which crosses the foaming torrent of the Sutlej. In this part of the Himalaya, and, indeed, on to Kashmir, these bridges are constructed of twigs, chiefly from birch trees or bushes, twisted together. Two thick ropes of these twigs, about the size of a man's thigh, or a little larger, are stretched across the river, at a distance of about six to four feet from each other, and a similar rope runs between them, three or four feet lower, being connected with the upper ropes by more slender ropes, also usually of birch twigs twisted together, but sometimes of grass, and occurring at an interval of about five feet from each other. The unpleasantness of a jhnla is that the passenger has no proper hold of the upper ropes, which are too thick and rough to be grasped by the hand ; and that, at the extremities, they are so far apart that it is difficult to have any hold of both at the same time ; while the danger is increased by the bend or hang of the jhi'da, which is much lower in the middle than at its ends. He has also to stoop painfully in order to move along it, and it is seldom safe for him to rest his feet on the lower rope, except where it is supported from the upper ropes by the transverse ones. To fall into the raging torrent underneath would be almost certain destruction. The high wind which usually prevails in the Himalaya during the day, makes the whole structure swing about frightfully. In the middle of the bridge there is a cross-bar of wood (to keep the two upper ropes separate) which has to be stepped over ; and it is not customary to repair a jhi'da until some one falls through it, and so gives practical demonstration that it is in rather a rotten condition." Andrew Wilson, "The Abode of Snow," p.