[68] The information obtained by me at Mafulu did not go beyond the actual facts as stated by me.  I cannot, however, help suspecting that there is, or has been, a close connection between the building of anemone and the holding of a big feast, and that the latter may be compared with the tabu ceremonial of the Koita described by Dr. Seligmann (Melanesians of British New Guinea, pp. 141 and 145 et seq.).  Indeed there are some elements of similarity between the two feasts.

[69] Compare the Roro custom for the messengers carrying an invitation to important feasts to take with them bunches of areca nut, which are hung in the marea of the local groups of the invited itsubu (Seligmann’s Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 218).

[70] See note on p. 256 as to the use by me of the terms “grave,” “bury” and “burial.”

[71] Ibid.

[72] It is the custom among the Kuni people when any woman (not merely the wife of a chief) has her first baby for the women of her own village, and probably of some neighbouring villages also, to assemble in the village and to attack her house and the village club-house with darts, which the women throw with their hands at the roofs.  At Ido-ido I saw that the roofs of the club-house and of some of the ordinary houses had a number of these darts sticking into them.  The darts were made out of twigs of trees, and were about five or six feet long; and each of them had a bunch of grass tied in a whorl at or near its head, and some of them had a similar bunch similarly tied at or near its middle.  See also Dr. Seligmann’s reference (Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 298) to the Roro custom for warriors, when returning from a successful campaign, to throw their spears at the roof and sides of the marea.  In Mekeo there is no corresponding ceremony on the birth of a first child; but men, women and children of the village collect by the house and sing all through the night; and in the morning the woman’s husband will kill a pig or dog for them, which they cook and eat without ceremony.

[73] Dr. Seligmann refers to this custom among the Roro people (Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 256), and there is no doubt that it exists among the Mekeo people also.  Father Desnoes, of the Sacred Heart Mission, told me that in Mekeo, though the pig used to be given when the boy adopted his perineal band at the age of four, five, six, or seven, it is now generally given earlier.  The pig is there regarded as the price paid for the child, and is called the child’s engifunga.

[74] Seligmann’s Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 67.

[75] Seligmann’s Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 71.

[76] Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 21.

[77] In Mekeo such a devolution of chieftainship is the occasion for a very large feast.

[78] This ceremony is different from the Mekeo ceremony on the elevation by a chief of his successor to a joint chieftainship, of which some particulars were given to me by Father Egedi; but there is an element of similarity to a Mekeo custom for the new chief, after the pigs have been killed and partly cut up by someone else, to cut the backs of the pigs in slices.