REVIEWS.
Fijian Society, or the Sociology and Psychology of the FijiANS. By Rev. W. Deane, M.A. (Syd.), B.D. (Lond.), Late Principal of the Teachers' Training College, Ndavui- levu, Fiji. London: Macmillan and Co. 1921. i6s. net.
Though several books, good in their different ways, have been written about the Fijians, notably by Commander Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expeditiqp, by the missionaries Williams, Waterhouse and Lorimer Fison, and last but not least by Sir Basil Thomson, it is not too much to say that Mr. Deane has in this book produced by far the best study yet available of the sociology and psychology — and incidentally of the folk-lore — of these Melanesian-Polynesian folk. It is true, as Mr. Deane himself points out, that he has had the great advantage of his predecessors' notes of social phenomena which the now rapidly changing circumstances in the South Sea Islands have already almost obliterated, but he could not have understood these earlier records as thoroughly as he has done, nor could he have systematized these by the light of his own very considerable experiences, had he not gone to the Fiji Islands after an anthropological training, of the modern kind, such as none of his predecessors have had, and thus with an unusual power of insight and of sympathetic understanding of the people with whom his work in Fiji brought him into very intimate relations. In short, he affords an excellent example of the fact of that anthropological training, and the sympathy which it brings, both to the missionary, as also to the administrator and the trader, and to the natives among whom the work of these lies.
