Plate LXV A Corpse Covered with Valuables. A great number of valuables, including large axe blades, with which this man was covered at dying, have been already withdrawn. Only personal possessions are left on the corpse, and they will be removed immediately before the interment.

In all this we find the expression of the same mental attitude, the extreme value attached to condensed wealth, the serious, respectful way of treating it, the idea and the feeling that it is the reservoir of highest good. The vaygu’a are valued in quite a different manner from that in which we value our wealth. The Biblical symbol of the golden calf might even be better applied to their attitude than to ours, although it would be not quite correct to say that they ‘worship’ the vaygu’a, for they worship nothing. The vaygu’a might perhaps be called “objects of cult” in the sense expressed by the facts of the Kula, and the data just adduced; that is, in so far as they are handled ritually in some of the most important acts of native life.

Thus, in several aspects, the Kula presents to us a new type of phenomenon, lying on the borderland between the commercial and the ceremonial and expressing a complex and interesting attitude of mind. But though it is novel, it can hardly be unique. For we can scarcely imagine that a social phenomenon on such a scale, and obviously so deeply connected with fundamental layers of human nature, should only be a sport and a freak, found in one spot of the earth alone. Once we have found this new type of ethnographic fact, we may hope that similar or kindred ones will be found elsewhere. For the history of our science shows many cases in which a new type of phenomena having been discovered, taken up by theory, discussed and analysed, was found subsequently all the world over.