ABSTRACT
Another feature, which any reader of this book may already have noticed in looking at the photographs, is the interest which the children take in magic. Often when the magician goes into the field accompanied by a bevy of young boys, or boys and girls, although sometimes the girls are not quite so welcome, this interest leads them to questions and they are answered very mu ch in the manner in which I was answered (cf. Texts 36-78) . Thus as a Trobriander grows into a tokwaybagula, 'perfect gardener', or the average approximation to that ideal, his technical ability develops side by side with his linguistic fluency, his ideas and beliefs about magic with his knowledge of the terms of magic, his ambitions and interests with the language of boasting, of praise and of criticism. And his intense appreciation of the value and beauty of the word seems to be present from the very beginning. Indeed it appears to me that it is in the study of juvenile and even infantile uses of words that we shall find the right approach to a real understanding of the nature of these. And this leads us to one more theoretical digression on infantile uses of words.
