Autobiography Of Noted

Polynesian

ANOTHER interesting book is promised from the pen of Professor Peter H.

Buck; Director of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, and a world authority on the Polynesians. At the re quest of friends, the scientist is contem plating an autobiography, and while on vacation recently in Hawaii he began to make notes for this work. His “Vikings of the Sunrise” is now unprocurable in this part of the world, and publishers regret that they did not seize the op portunity of printing an Australian edition. Copies of his “Anthropology and Religion”, published by the Yale Univer sity Press, are even more scarce, and can already be regarded as “collectors’ pieces”. All Dr. Buck’s earlier books have greatly increased in value. A volume of reminiscences would now make fascina ting reading.

The story of Te Rangi Hiroa is indeed one of the romances of the Pacific in modern times. Trained as a medical man, this son of an Irish father and a nobly born Maori mother, became a member of the New Zealand Parliament, then a Cabinet Minister, and finally abandoned a safe and assured post in the public service to follow what had been his hobby —the study of ethnology and anthro pology. From a field post in the Bishop Museum, he eventually became head of that institution of world renown, and a nrofessor at Yale. No other member of his race has explored such unknown fields, or brought brighter renown upon the Polynesian peoples.—“Eriki.”