Excerpt from Melanesians and Polynesians: Their Life-Histories Described and Compared MY acquaintance with the natives of the East and West Pacific extends over a term of forty eight years. During that time I resided in Samoa for fourteen years continuously, from 1860 to 1874, and I have often visited the group in later years. In 1875 I landed in New Britain, now named the Bismarck Archipel. At that time there was no white man living in the group, and practically nothing was known of those islands or of the people living there. I resided there until the end of 1880, with the exception of the time occupied by two visits to Australia, and I have revisited that group on several occasions since that time. My acquaintance with the great Solomon Islands group began in the year 1879, and since then I have visited the group on several occasions. During these many voyages I have visited Tonga, Fiji, New Hebrides, Santa Cruz, New Ireland, New Hanover, New Guinea, the large atolls of the Ontong Java and the Tasman groups, and many others of the smaller islands in the Pacific. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.