The Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to Melanesia

Abstract

IN the autumn of last year the trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund made a grant to Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, F.R.S., of St. John's College, Cambridge, to enable him to make detailed sociological studies in the Pacific, and more particularly to study mother-right communities in the Solomon Islands, and to trace the details of the transition from mother-right to father-right. Dr. Rivers left England at the end of November, and, after staying a short time in the United States, proceeded to the Hawaiian Islands. Dr. Lewis H. Morgan, in his classical work, “Ancient Society,” says (p. 403), “Among the Hawaiians and other Polynesian tribes there still exists in daily use a system of consanguinity which may be pronounced the oldest known among mankind. … It is the simplest, and therefore the oldest form, of the classificatory system.”