The Warring Scientists

In The Days Of

Beards

The Warring Scientists of Tahiti

rr.HERE is an old legend that at one X time all men of New Zealand wore big shaggy beards.

In all ages of the world, as we know, the beard has been the outward and vis ible sign of inner enlightenment, and a repute—which men of New Zealand were too modest to deny—spread to distant lands that Wisdom had indeed estab lished her throne in peerless Te-ao-tea roa.

At an early period of our residence at Tahiti, the Pontifex Maximus of this race of wise men visited Papeete. He was a scientist. New, the great Hegira was then far in the future, and we had not yet learned to know scientists as they really are.

The professor had searched out and established, beyond cavil, the origin, natal home and subsequent migration of the Polynesian race. The older theories he disposed of with thoroughness and despatch.

Once, and only once, we timidly ven tured to quote from a book we were then reading, which identified Indonesia as the probable Havaiki of Polynesian legend. A gesture of the professor’s beard, poised like a menacing thunder bolt, to hurl us to a nethermost Tartarus of humiliation and confusion, silenced us, while he continued to overwhelm us with the profundity of his learning. We could only gaze, while “still the wonder grew,

that one small head could carry all he knew.”

The professor’s thesis *was that if any group in any part of the world had set a few big stones upright in a circle, or piled massive rocks on each other to create a rude architectural form, they were blood-kin of the builders of Crom lechs and Dolmens in the shadow of the Alps and Pyrenees. The Polynesians’ ancestors, led by the professor, had a long, hard journey across the steppes of Asia and over wintry seas before he settled them safely on the sunny isles of the South Pacific. There was no one to gainsay; we knew nothing of Polynesian lore in those far-off days.

So the question was settled—until the scientist from California arrived. This learned man was beardless. His visage had somewhat the aspect of the Great Stone Face which stares eternally from a lofty cliff in the New Hampshire mountains. Moreover, he was a Native Son of the Golden West. He was con vinced that the Polynesians are Autoch thons, clinging to the remnants of a sub merged continent.

The battle of the Titans was not fought on Tahiti, but on the purple waters of the Pacific Ocean. A little steamer which voyaged from Papeete to the Aus trals, Rapa, the Gamblers, and return, had the professor, the Native Son and one obscure layman as the only passen gers on board.

The layman told us later that the sea had been calm; but he could give us no more than fragmentary testimony con cerning the tempest which raged during the whole of the voyage—as he had passed most of the time in a place of safety behind the capstan in the bow of the vessel. The skipper and crew, who knew no English, could testify only of

thunders and shoutings, which increased in fury day by day. Here, ashore, the two scientists maintained silence, behind grim countenances, until they departed from the colony in opposite directions.

We at Tahiti believed that, with the departure of the savants to their respec tive home-lands, this little hurricane had spent its fury without disturbing the atmospheric balance in more distant regions. Then, after a time, two extra ordinary and disturbing events followed which seemed to be related with this battle in the Australs.

One, the professor suddenly discarded his theory of Polynesian origins among the Cromlechs and Dolmens, and began industriously to explore for Maori ances tors in submarine caverns of the Lost Continent of Mu.

Two, the men of New Zealand shaved off their beards.

Was this latter a sign of national mourning (Polynesian women cut off their long tresses under similar circum stances) over the flight of the Goddess of Wisdom from New Zealand to, per haps, California or (as is more likely, in the light of subsequent history) to another planet? We do not know. One thing, however, is certain. It was not long before the whole world of scientists was buzzing like a hive of angry bees.

And theji the anthropologists began to

come.—.

A.C.R.

The Anglican Provincial Board of Missions in New Zealand has made a grant of £joo for the extension of the mission school at Labasa, Fiji, and has promised an increased amount for the year 1942-43.