anchor, may be
able to transmit iron, while European weapons may be used by people who
have never even seen a white man. Again, missionaries introduce the
Christian religion among people who cannot speak a word of English or
any language but their own or only use such European words as have been
found necessary to express ideas or objects connected with the new
religion. There is evidence how readily language may be affected, and
here again the present day suggests a mechanism by which such a change
takes place. English is now becoming the language of the Pacific and of
other parts of the world through its use as a _lingua franca_, which
enables natives who speak different languages to converse not only with
Europeans but with one another, and I believe that this has often been
the mechanism in the past; that, for instance, the introduction of what
we now call the Melanesian structure of language was due to the fact
that the language of an immigrant people who settled in a region of
great linguistic diversity came to be used as a _lingua franca_, and
thus gradually became the basis of the languages of the whole people.

But now let us turn to social structure. We find in Oceania islands
where Europeans have been settled as missionaries or traders perhaps for
fifty or a hundred years; we find the people wearing European clothes
and European ornaments, using European utensils and even European
weapons when they fight; we find them holding the beliefs and practicing
the ritual of a European religion; we find them speaking a European
language, often even among themselves, and yet investigation shows that
much of their social structure remains thoroughly native and
uninfluenced, not only in its general form, but often even in its minute
details. The external influence has swept away the whole material
culture, so that objects of native origin are manufactured only to sell
to tourists; it has substituted a wholly new religion and destroyed
every material, if not every moral, vestige of the old; it has caused
great modification and degeneration of the old language; and yet it may
have left the social structure in the main untouched. And the reasons
for this are clear. Most of the essential social structure of a people
lies so below the surface, it is so literally the foundation of the
whole life of the people, that it is not seen; it is not obvious, but
can only be reached by patient and laborious exploration. I will give a
f