NATIVE TARO FIELD ON MAEVO.
As a rule, thick forest covers the islands; only rarely we find areas covered with reed-grass. On Erromanga these are more frequent.
In the Santa Cruz Islands the flora seems richer than in the New Hebrides.
Still more simple than the flora is the fauna. Of mammals there are only the pig, dog, a flying-fox and the rat, of which the first two have probably been imported by the natives. There are but few birds, reptiles and amphibies, but the few species there are are very prolific, so that we find swarms of lizards and snakes, the latter all harmless Boidæ, but occasionally of considerable size.
Crocodiles are found only in the Santa Cruz Islands, and do not grow so large there as in the Solomon Islands.
Animal life in the sea is very rich; turtles and many kinds of fish and Cetaceæ are plentiful.
Native Population
The natives belong to the Melanesian race, which is a collective name for the dark-skinned, curly-haired, bearded inhabitants of the Pacific. The Melanesians are quite distinct from the Australians, and still more so from the lank-haired, light-skinned Polynesians of the eastern islands. Probably a mixture of Polynesians and Melanesians are the Micronesians, who are light-skinned but curly-haired, and of whom we find representatives in the New Hebrides. The island-nature of the archipelago is very favourable to race-mixture; and as we know that on some islands there were several settlements of Polynesians, it is not surprising to find a very complex mingling of races, which it is not an easy task to disentangle. It would seem, however, that we have before us remnants of four races: a short, dark, curly-haired and perhaps original race, a few varieties of the tall Melanesian race, arrived in the islands in several migrations, an old Polynesian element as a relic of its former migrations eastward, and a present Polynesian element from the east.
Every traveller will notice that the lightest population is in the south and north-east of the New Hebrides, while the darkest is in the north-west, and the ethnological difference corresponds to this division.
In the Banks Islands we find, probably owing to recent immigration, more Polynesian blood than in the northern New Hebrides; in the Santa Cruz group the process of mixing seems to be just going on.