beliefs in the one place, it is difficult to see why there should have been so great a failure in the other.
A more important difference between the two regions is their distance from Indonesia. Once migrants from Indonesia have reached the shores of New Guinea they are in contact with an island, so large that it might almost be called a continent, the shores of which can be visited without calling upon the spirit of enterprise necessary for journeys to the more distant Solomon Islands. We can be fairly confident, therefore, that influences from Indonesia have permeated New Guinea which never reached Melanesia proper, and there is much in the cultures of the two regions to support this conjecture.
I suggest, therefore, that such evidence as we possess concerning the duplicity of the soul in Melanesia is due to some relatively early migration which reached both New Guinea and Melanesia, but has in the former place been overlaid by later influence from Indonesia which did not pass beyond New Guinea.
I have so far considered only the relation between the Indonesian concept and those of New Guinea and Melanesia. Mr. Perry has given us good reason to suppose that the Indonesian concept was introduced into that region from the west. This raises the possibility that the cultural influence which brought the ideas in question to Indonesia travelled on to Melanesia, introducing there the idea of the duality of the soul. For reasons which I shall mention in a moment it is of great importance that the district of Melanesia in which we have the most definite evidence of this duplicity is San Cristoval in the Solomon Islands. The Rev. C. E. Fox has recently sent to Professor Elliot Smith and myself a record of the modes of burial of men of a certain clan chiefly in that and neighbouring islands. These funerary customs bear so close a resemblance to those of Egypt as to leave no reasonable doubt that travellers,
