Pacific Curios.

Wanted To Purchase.

The Editor of the “Pacific Islands Monthly” has been asked by Overseas Museums for Introductions to Sellers of Old Specimens of Pacific Islands Native Arts and Crafts, for Museum Use.

It is emphasised that no Spears, Bows and Arrows, or “Junk” of any description will be considered only first-class pieces of undoubted authenticity.

An English Museum asks particularly to be “put in touch with any old traders who might wish to realise on genuine old Curios collected in the South Seas.”

Write, in first place, to

The Editor,

“Pacific Islands Monthly,”

P.O. Box 3408 R, Sydney,

giving full details.

Letters will be sorted out and, where desirable, sent to the Museums in terested, and the latter will be asked to write direct to the persons concerned.

or so!) was beyond question. And about the time when Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (1859) appeared—on that aus picious day when the writer of this article was also “published” to an un grateful world—a change from the static to a dynamic view of the problems of human origins, and human capacities made possible a humane, and scientific method in their study. We now are able, through scientific writers, to recog nise that Mind is one aspect of that unique kind of activity which we call Life.

Perhaps there is no bodily activity that is not in some degree “thrilled with mind” —as one author ably puts it.

There are times when the bodily activity is more in evidence than mental, and other times the mind rules supreme.

Civilisation is nothing more or less than the rule of the Mind-body obtaining: taking the place of the Body-mind.

Whatever lowers preponderating in fluence of the Mind-body over the Body mind is “a cowardly and traitorous suc cumbing” (as John Wesley puts it) to that animalism which our forebears overcame painfully, leaving us “heirs of progress” to protect the dear-won vic tory. ‘‘It is one of the delights of Natural History” (wrote Professor Arthur Thom son in his entrancing “Minds of Ani mals”) to follow the growing freedom of the mind through all the “spires of form,’ from worm to man.” The Mind did not suddenly appear, as a bolt from the blue, in Man —or in some special breed of man. Evolutionists (and who is not one to-day?) regard all becoming as a process in which each stage emerges naturally out of its antecedent stage, without intrusion or impulses, or forces from without.

Except in overwhelming self-conceit, is Man so very much advanced above the Animal Kingdom, whence he compara tively recently emerged, or rather strayed. The eel had electricity before him, the fire-fly still beats him with an artificial light which is cold; the silk worm was before him in its special line.

The wasp made paper before Man was dreamed of; even the dandelion knew all about parachutes, millions of years Spiders sailed on silken aeroplanes be fore the Cus-Cus, or his cousins, de termined to change into a tail-less crea ture that was content to play golf or bridge whilst others provided it with food. Caddis-worms made nets ere history began; and termites built huge houses; “water-boatmen” used oars, and beavers built dams ere our time to ap pear had arrived.

Civilisation after civilisation has arisen to grow mushroom-shaped and top-heavy with Knowledge which was not Wisdom, and Power that was not Righteous Rule; and the crashing downfall due in most cases because the few blessed with “Mind-body” neglected to strengthen the supports of the structure by bringing in to the civilised centre the half-animal mass of the populations.

Ere I last left Samarai, I saw a fine house being built which was designed, and contracted for, and carried out in every detail —electric-light and garden design, etc. —by brown-men, trained in that most admirable of ail Mission sta tions that I have yet visited personally, that of Kwato—over which that wonderful woman, Miss Phyllis Abel, daughter of the great Missionary of that name, has control. These artificers are sons of “Fathers of war-proof,” as dear old Bill put it, who the ‘‘mere savages” of disgustful Pacific travellers

a few years ago. We need only turn to the pages of Miss Dorothy George’s “London Life in the Eighteenth Cen tury,” or have visited the old Inquisition torture-chambers of Holland, to understand that the “savage” brown man and the pseudo-civilised white-man are (as Kipling remarked) uncommonly alike in Body-mind until some Murray genius puts us in the way of acquir ing Mind-body and the control of our “Animalisms” inherited from the com mon ancestors of both.