Introduction

I WAS demonstrating to a zoological class at Oxford one day, when Professor (then Mr.) J. S. Huxley suddenly asked me whether I would care to go to the New Hebrides to accompany an anthropologist from Cambridge who intended to work there. I was quite ignorant of this group of islands, and indeed hardly knew where to look for it on a map; but the idea of biological research among a primitive people in the South Seas was too great an attraction to allow mere ignorance of its geographical position to deter me from at once deciding to go. The Trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund partly financed me, and in a few months Mr. T. T. Barnard and I were on our way to this little-known quarter of the globe.