ABSTRACT
A lively trade, elaborate currencies, keen traders and grasping money-makers seem out of place in Oceania. Oceania provides illustrations of all the stages in the evolution of money, for it includes Australia and Polynesia, in which no native currencies developed: and Micronesia and Melanesia, in which one can recognize all the human gradations from present-givers and barterers to communities of commercially minded traders, with monetary systems more complicated than their own. Both Nissan and Tanga are notable for their shell arm-rings used for trading with the mainland, and although the material is the same on all the islands, the processes of manufacture and the products are very different. Trading in islands is mainly by barter, notably the exchange of Nitendi sago for Reef Island girls to be trained as village prostitutes, yet there is a variety of currency, more varied than in many of the larger groups.
