Samoa

Abstract

FOR the purposes of comparative ethnology Dr. Turner's new work on Samoa, that group of ten islands in the Pacific which the Frenchman Bougainville named the Navigators' Islands in 1768, is entitled to stand in the same rank with such books as Williams's account of Fiji or Mariner's “Tongan Islands.” The careful study of Samoan beliefs and customs for a period of more than forty years confers unusual authority on the writer's statements, whilst his des:ription of their heathen condition derives more than ordinary value from the fact of his having been among the earliest missionaries who visited the islands. Mr. Tylor, in the short preface he has prefixed to the book, speaks with justice of the peculiar interest which attaches to a work that describes Polynesian life as seen in its almost unaltered state before contact with European races had inaugurated a period of rapid change and made what was original and native indistinguishable from what was of foreign importation.

Samoa. A Hundred Years ago and long before.

By George Turner With Preface by E. B. Tylor, F.R.S. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1884.)