Such reconstructions are legitimate for an Ethnographer, as well as for a historian. But it is a duty of the former as well as of the latter to show his sources as well as to explain how he has manipulated them. In one of the next chapters, Chapter XVIII, Divisions XIV–XVII, a sample of this methodological aspect of the work will be given, although the full elaboration of sources and methods must be postponed to another publication.

See Chapter II, Division VII.

I cannot tell what sort of influence this would be, exercised by a sister over her brother in Dobu. I do not even know whether, in that district, there obtains the same taboo between brother and sister as in the Trobriands.

This is the information which I obtained during my short visit to Murua (Woodlark Island), and which was confirmed by the Trobriand Islanders. Professor Seligman states, also, that the sepulchral pots, found in this island come from the Amphletts. op. cit., p. 731. Compare also pp. 15 and 535.

See Chapter VI, Division VI.

The reader will note that this is the same name, which another mythical dog bore, also of the Lukuba clan as all dogs are, the one namely from whom the kayga’u magic is traced. Cf. Chapter X, Division V.

Cf. Professor C. G. Seligman, “The Melanesians,” Chapter LIV, “Burial and Mourning Ceremonies” (among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, of Woodlark and the Marshall Bennetts).

Compare also No. VI (A), in the Synoptic Table of Kula magic, in Chapter XVII, p. 418.

There can be no better expression to denote the mutual relation of all these ideas than that used by Frazer to describe one of the typical forms of magic thought, the ‘contagion of ideas.’ The subjective, psychological process leads the natives to the belief in magical contagion of things.