Myths And Songs From The South Pacific

MYTHS AND SONGS FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC BY THE REV. WILLIAM WYATT GILL, B. A., OF THE LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY. WITH A PREFACE BY F. MAX MULLER, M. A., JKQFESSOK OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AT OXFORD FOREIGN MBMBBK OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE. HENRY S. KING Co., LONDON, 1876. 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 Preface. 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 mostperplexing 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 mythopceic 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...