’All that I can do is to learn many dialects of a given archipelago, present their existing varieties, and so work back to the original language.  This, to some extent, has been done in the Banks group, and in the eastern part of the Solomon Isles.  But directly I get so far as this, I am recalled to the practical necessity of using the knowledge of the several dialects rather to make known God’s truth to the heathen than to inform literati of the process of dialectic variation.  Don’t mistake me, my dear friend, or suspect me of silly sentimentalism.  But you can easily understand what it is to feel “God has given to me only of all Christian men the power of speaking to this or that nation, and, moreover, that is the work He has sent me to do.”  Often, I don’t deny, I should like the other better.  It is very pleasant to shirk my evening class, e.g. and spend the time with Sir William Martin, discussing some point of Melanesian philosophy.  But then my dear lads have lost two hours of Christian instruction, and that won’t do.

’I don’t need to be urged to do more in working out their languages.  I am quite aware of the duty of doing all that I can in that way, and I wish to do it; but there are only twenty-four hours in the day and night together!  I feel that it is a part of my special work, for each grammar and dictionary that I can write opens out the language to some other than myself.  But I am now apologising rather for my fragmentary way of writing what I do write by saying that what I find enough, with my help given in school to enable one of my party to learn a dialect, I am almost obliged to regard as a measure of the time that I ought to spend on it.

’Another thing, I have no outline provided for me, which I can fill up.  My own clear impression is that to attempt to follow the analogy of our complicated Greek and Latin grammars would not only involve certain failure, but would mislead people altogether.  I don’t want to be hunting after a Melanesian paulo-post-futurum.  I had rather say, “All men qua men think, and have a power of expressing their thoughts.  They have wants and express them.  They use many different forms of speech in making that statement, if we look superficially at the matter, not so if we look into it,” and so on.  Then, discarding the ordinary arrangement of grammars, explain the mode of thought, the peculiar method of thinking upon matters of common interest, in the mind of the Melanesian, as exhibited in his language.  An Englishman says, “When I get there, it will be night.”  But a Pacific Islander says, “I am there, it is night.”  The one says, “Go on, it will soon be dark.”  The other, “Go on, it has become already night.”  Anyone sees that the one possesses the power of realising the future as present, or past; the other now whatever it may have been once, does not exercise such power.  A companion calls me at 5.30 A.M., with the words, “Eke! me gong veto,” (Hullo! it is night