ever known. They built two-decked canoes of plank large enough to carry big stores of food and water and even livestock. They possessed a knowledge of the stars and steered their course by them. That they must have come this way is further evidenced by the fact that an intelligent Polynesian of Hawaii can understand almost everything that a Samoan says even though the islands lie so far apart, and, except for the several waves of colonization, have had no intercourse with each other prior to the arrival of the European. Nearly all the ethnologists are agreed upon this theory of the origin of the race. At the present time further investigations are being made by the Bishop Museum and Yale University. Their work is only half completed, but already they have collected a vast amount of information which it is believed will still further corroborate the accepted theory.

Arrived at the islands the Polynesians found conditions admirably suited to their needs. The soil, usually being of volcanic origin, was fertile and covered with a rich vegetation, including the taro, the bread-fruit, the sweet potato, the yam and the banana. The waters about the islands abound in fish, and though no edible animals appear to have been indigenous, the early settlers brought with them pigs which flourished in both a wild and domestic state and have always been highly regarded as a food by the natives.

For many centuries they led a savage but contented existence here, completely shut off from the rest of the world. Happy would they have been if they could have remained in this seclusion! Early Spanish navigators touched at some of the smaller islands. and by the eighteenth century all of the main groups were known. The Hawaiian Islands were the last to be discovered, being unknown until an English navigator, Captain James Cook, landed there in 1778.

At the time of discovery the different groups of islands were in various stages of advancement, the Samoans being the most civilized and the Marquesans the most savage. All of them were living in a feudal state, similar to that which prevailed in Europe in medieval times. The chiefs owned all the land and parcelled it out among their followers, who however were not bound to the land but if dissatisfied could transfer their allegiance to some other chieftain. For many years there had been waging almost continual internecine wars which must have limited the population even before discovery.

Since the coming of the European many changes have taken place in government, mode of living and religion. The islands are no longer independent. The Marquesan and Society Islands belong to France; the Cook and Tonga Islands belong to Great

Britain; the Hawaiian Islands and part of Samoa belong to the United States. The people have largely abandoned their ancient manner of living and adopted that of the European. One of their most peculiar systems was that of the tabu. The tabu was a prohibition of certain articles or certain acts and was religious in character. Anyone who violated a tabu was supposed to be visited by a certain malady and, unless the proper remedial measures were taken, in three days' time to die. Anyone could tabu anything that belonged to him, but there were a great many tabus of universal application. The following are examples: men and women were compelled to eat in separate houses, and women could not cook over a fire built by a man. Women were not allowed to eat certain food such as bananas, cocoanuts and pork. Women could not enter any canoe, but if they desired to cross any river or lake or reach a ship had to swim. A commoner was prohibited from crossing the shadow of a chief. At certain tabu periods no sound could be heard, no fire could be lighted, even the dogs were muzzled and fowls tied up. For various reasons the system is now overthrown.

The simple dress of the people, which consisted for the men of a loin cloth, for the women of a short girdle of leaves, has been changed for the more elaborate dress of the European. The native houses made of bamboo poles and thatch have given place to houses of wood. Even the occupations have changed. Formerly the native did little work aside from picking and cooking his food, spearing fish and making his simple dress and implements. Now many products are raised for export, the cultivation of sugar especially having become the main industry of most of the islands. The native religion, with its many gods, its prayers and its songs, has yielded to Christianity, the islanders accepting the new religion. en masse. Doubtless the acceptance in many cases has been largely a matter of form, for the inhabitants in times of trouble still secretly address prayers to their ancient gods.

Since the coming of the foreigner the Polynesians, despite their wonderful physique, have alarmingly decreased in numbers. Captain Cook estimated the population of the Hawaiian Islands at 420,000; to-day there are only 24,000 Hawaiians of pure blood. The Tahitians numbered 150,000 in 1774, fell to 17,000 in 1880 and to 10,300 in 1899. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century the decrease has been in Tonga from 30,000 to 17,500; in the Cook group from 11,500 to 8,400; in Manakini from 1,600 to 1,000; and in Easter Island from 600 to 100. In the valley of Typee in the Marquesas, where Herman Melville was so kindly treated, from a tribe which formerly boasted 4,000 fighting men only a dozen wretches have survived.

Such a decrease can be only partly accounted for by the wars, massacres and raiding for the South American and Australian slave trade before this traffic was stopped. A more important cause is the introduction of diseases by foreigners. Sickness was almost unknown to the Polynesians prior to the coming of the foreigners, and consequently they lacked the toxin in their blood which renders other peoples partially immune. A mild disease has been known to carry them off by the thousands; a single epidemic of measles once destroyed a tenth of all the natives of the Hawaiian Islands. Their swift change of habits has also rendered them the victims of many plagues. The Polynesian is amphibious by nature and as much at home in the water as out of it. In his scant native costume he would quickly dry off upon emerging from the water and be no worse off for his bath. Having adopted the trousers and shirt of the European he still goes into the water with his clothes on, insisting that if clothes are good they are good all the time. The clothes remain wet after he emerges and bring a heavy toll upon life in the forms of pneumonia and tuberculosis. The replacement of the native hut by the wooden house has exposed the native to the same plagues. The hut, made of thatch, was always well ventilated because of the looseness of its structure; the wooden house, of which the native persistently refuses to open the windows at night, is close and stuffy. The prohibition of the joyous native pastimes by over-zealous missionary endeavor, together with the lugubriousness of some of the things taught him, has depressed the native, rendering him an easier prey to the ravages of disease. The introduction of rum and opium has been a calamity to him, weakening and degrading him more than "firewater" has degraded the American Indian.

From every point of view the coming of the foreigner has been an immeasurable curse to the Polynesian. Left to themselves the Islanders could be living to-day in a paradise unvisited by the plagues, pestilence and calamities that attack mankind now the world over. Before the visitation of the European and the Asiatic their flowery isles set in the midst of dark blue seas were far removed from every beast of prey, every poisonous serpent, every malady rising from the congested slums of earth. The gentle people led a carefree existence, spending much of their time swimming, riding the surf, playing at their sports of wrestling, boxing and football, dancing their expressive folk-dances of love and goodwill.

How changed is it all now! From the east and from the west have come calamities. The mosquito, the rat, the mongoose have arrived; though there are still no snakes, some fool will doubtless

soon import a couple of rattlers. The crews of the ships brought syphilis, which among a people with loose ties of marriage was bound to rage terribly; the Chinese brought leprosy, a disease unknown in the islands prior to 1848, but now there are nearly a thousand victims of this terrible plague segregated on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian group. The changed conditions of living have resulted in a holocaust of death from pneumonia and tuberculosis, while measles and smallpox have done their worst among a people unable to withstand them. The Polynesian is perishing. Stopped are the games and the hulahula dances, forgotten are the songs of the fathers. Yet a little while and the rippling flow of his language, more like music than like speech, will have vanished from the earth; soon the very "aloha" will be heard no more. The Polynesian understands his fate. With a smile half sad, half hopeless, he looks forward to the day when he will be but a memory among the race of men.

THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGINATION'

By Dr. WALTER LIBBY

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

N books and articles touching on the psychology and logic of research, a certain confusion has frequently arisen from the use of terms like intuition, illumination, and inspiration, which seem almost to defy definition, as well as from an unwarranted use of terms like imagination and conception, regarding the denotation of which there is some approach to harmony among the recognized exponents of mental science.

Among the philosophers, Wundt, Bergson and James, for example, acknowledge-each in his own way, to be sure-a close relationship between the imagination and the memory. Both of these mental processes admit of analysis into simple sensory elements. Reproductive imagination differs indeed from memory only in so far as it is unaccompanied by a sense of repetition. The productive, or creative, imagination, though it differs from the reproductive in the freedom with which it manipulates and rehandles sensory data, is nevertheless as dependent as it on the materials furnished by the eye, ear and other sense organs. We may rearrange and recombine the data supplied by sensation and retained. in consciousness; we can create nothing absolutely new.

Nearly all of the chapter on imagination in James's Principles of Psychology would be equally relevant in a discussion of the memory. The point of view of this eminent philosopher and psychologist is so opposed to the views of writers like Tyndall and Pearson, who are inclined to identify the scientific imagination with creative thought in general (which it is our purpose to analyse), that it seems worth while to examine in some detail the phenomena of retention and recall, and, by differentiating one type of memory from another, obtain a clue to the various types of imagination in the strictest sense of that term.

Cases of remarkable powers of visual recall have been put on record by James. One of these he quotes:

1 This is the first of a series of lectures on the "Psychology and Logic of Research," given before the Industrial Fellows of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research of the University of Pittsburgh, February 14-May 2,