Things Anthropological and
Zoological

Things Anthropological and Zoological

It was the census year, and the law provided that the Minister of Police should be responsible for numbering the people. His arrangements were somewhat primitive, but I daresay that they produced more satisfactory results than would the more elaborate machinery of our Registrar-General if put into the hands of such workmen. Kubu simply ordered his policemen to visit every village and write down the names of the inhabitants. In a country where every individual is personally known if not related to the enumerator, not many omissions are likely to have been made. The total census of the natives was 19,196.

The registers of the births and deaths for the previous ten years showed the population to be steadily decreasing, not so much on account of excessive mortality as of a low birth-rate. The death-rate (36 per mille), however, was high when compared with European countries; and it would be strange if it were not so, when it is remembered that the arrival of Europeans has introduced the germs of many diseases from which the natives were formerly free, and to which they are therefore not yet inured. Chiefly de-page 372structive among these are dysentery and whooping-cough, both of them unknown to the Tongans before the advent of European ships. But apart from bacilli of actual foreign diseases, there is now no doubt that the different races of men are themselves uncongenial, and that their first meeting generates a mysterious poison fatal to the weaker race. In the Pacific, Tahiti, Niue (Savage Island), and Penrhyn Island in particular were swept by a destructive epidemic immediately after the visit of the first European ship, though the visitors were not themselves suffering from any such ailment at the time. Such disasters have led the natives of some of the islands to adopt a murderous system of quarantine, and the loss of many lives has been the result. Tonga, however, seems to have been spared this penalty that attaches to the "blessings of civilisation," unless the tradition of an epidemic following Tasman's visit has been lost. The first sickness preserved by tradition is the ngangau (lit. headache), a new disease that ravaged the group about the year 1776, but which was not associated in the natives' minds with the visit of Captain Cook three years before. Of this many hundreds are said to have perished.

I do not believe that the population of Tonga ever greatly exceeded 20,000. It is true that the natives have traditions of a time when the king's orders could be shouted from house to house as the people lay on their mats; but I think that this refers to the time when each family lived in its own plantation instead of in villages,— a state of things that was observed by Tasman in 1643. Cook estimated the people present at the entertainment given to him at Maofanga in June 1777 at 10,000, the page 373present population of Tongatabu. Since that time the population has been either stationary or decreasing-slightly under normal circumstances, rapidly in time of epidemic. In 1893 the measles and the diseases consequent upon it carried off one-twentieth of the people. In the absence of such severe visitations whooping-cough is the most destructive of the introduced diseases. The mothers lack the knowledge and the self-devotion required to successfully nurse their children through such illnesses, and content themselves with calling in one native quack after another to dose the unfortunate child with a succession of nostrums until death puts an end to its sufferings.

For the low birth-rate there are several reasons. In ancient times the women were required to do no work beyond the light occupations of fishing and cloth-beating. The men planted the food, carried in the wood and water, and did the cooking. The missionaries have so industriously cultivated the idea of family life that in most Tongan households the women, after marriage, do the same work as the wives of the peasantry in Europe. In other respects they have greater liberty than under the heathen system. Formerly a girl's hair was cropped short at about twenty, and she was thenceforward classed as an old woman (fefine motua). No woman of mature age could then masquerade in the guise of a young girl, and there was no inducement to defer marriage and the cares of maternity; for the woman who aspired to be younger than her years had no peace from the sneers of her contemporaries. This is all changed. Under the grim social code of the missionaries, by a mockery of fate, a laxer page 374moral tone allows a girl to prolong her independence to the limit set by time to her attractions, and she finds life so amusing that she defers marriage until the last possible bridegroom has left her for a younger generation. Even after marriage she is at a disadvantage as compared with her grandmother, who could count in childbed upon the help of her female relatives, according to certain fixed rules, instead of having, as now, to receive help as a favour only. These reasons and the increased skill of the women in forbidden forms of surgery tend to a decrease in the birth-rate. To those who would know more of this subject, I commend the Report of the Commission appointed to inquire into the decrease of the native race in Fiji, 1893. The report, besides being interesting, is of high anthropological value.

Though the Tongans are vastly particular about outward modesty, they cannot truthfully be described as an over-sensitive people. We halted one day for lunch in a small village at the back of Tongatabu. The house was filled with the notables of the place, and the children stared at us six deep through the crevices in the reed walls. There was a sudden cry of faele! and in a few seconds we were left alone in the house. The children dashed off at the first cry, and after a decent interval our hosts made excuses one after another to leave the house. From the doorway I saw the whole population of the village thronging into a hut on the opposite side of the square. It was a birth.

A Tongan mother is delivered in a reclining posture, supported in the arms of her husband. There is no privacy,—the whole village is present. There is always a page 375"wise woman" officiating, generally one of the hereditary sisterhood, but sometimes an old woman who had adopted the profession from choice, and is consequently looked down upon as an interloper and a quack. The fees, given in kind, are high when the poverty of the donors is considered—ngatu and mats to the value of 30s. or more. The "wise woman" receives the child on a tiny mat specially plaited for the occasion. If it is a boy, the umbilicus is severed on a digging-stick to make him a good cultivator; if a girl, on a ngatu—mallet to make her a good beater of cloth. The child is then washed and rubbed over with oil and turmeric, a small quantity of candle-nut and cocoa-nut juice is forced into its mouth to make it vomit, and for the first two days it is fed by hand upon cocoa-nut-milk, or suckled by another woman, because at that early stage the mother's milk is believed to be insufficient and unwholesome. During the first month the child's grandmothers, or its unmarried aunts, are told off to supply the mother with food and look after the house, and the mother is spared all exertion. It would be better for her and the child if at this stage she were also deprived of kava and tobacco. Before the missionaries had inculcated family life on the European plan, the native social system recognised a physical peculiarity in Tongan women, and insisted upon the seclusion of the mother during the whole period of lactation in order to avoid a second gestation within too short a period of the birth, and consequently the premature weaning of the first child. As in Japan, the time of suckling was prolonged until all the teeth had come; for the Tongans have no good substitute for the mother's page 376milk, and could only give the children taro, yam, or fish as the first food after weaning. The change in this system of family separation is the cause most commonly quoted by the natives for the high mortality among children.

I have said that the Tongans are sticklers for propriety in appearances. In some respects, however, they share with the other Polynesian peoples a gross lack of delicacy. Ancient custom still constrains the elderly female relations of the bridegroom to go home with the married pair and stay with them until they are in a position to prove to the other relations that the marriage is satisfactory, and that the dower is therefore due.

All the weaknesses of pride of race that we laugh at in ourselves, and feel none the less keenly, may be studied among these other islanders of the antipodes. There is a Tongan colony in Fiji, the children of the army of occupation taken over by Maafu in 1848. The real Tongans patronise their colonials, and speak of them behind their backs as barbarians, ignorant of the usages of polite society. The colonists affect to ridicule the Tongan aristocracy as effete and effeminate, and envy them in secret, bestowing on them the involuntary flattery of imitation. A Tongan colonist who has been to Nukualofa and conversed with the great of the earth returns home to be a nuisance to his fellows, who try to disguise their feeling of inferiority by disparagement of the intercourse which they so much envy. Thus, as between the English and the Australians, a gulf is gradually being fixed between the Tongans of Tonga and Fiji. Not less instructive is the feeling between the Tongans and the Fijians. While affecting ta despise the Fijians for their want of refinement, the page 377Tongan chief, stripped of his wealth and influence by his new-fangled communism, secretly envies the authority which his Fijian neighbour has been too wise to surrender: the Fijian chief, though full of contempt for the leaning towards foreign customs that has reduced the Tongan chief to poverty, tries hard to imitate his air of superior refinement. The Tongan chief likes nothing better than to be entertained by a great chief in Fiji, and feel again vicariously the glories of his lost estate, and eat taro, and hear the murmur of running water, both luxuries unknown in his own dry country. The Fijian loves to have such guests, and show them off to his neighbours as proof of the wide range of his influence. So each reflects glory on the other. They are ridiculously shy of one another. While Tukuaho was paying a visit to me in Auckland, Ratu Lala, the Tui Thakau, came from Fiji to make a tour through the Australian colonies. The two chiefs, on the ground of their relationship through a common ancestress, were very anxious to meet, and they both besought me to bring about the introduction. Tukuaho spoke excellent Fijian, and Ratu Lala is no less fluent in Tongan, but to my astonishment I found that I was expected to act as interpreter between them. Their conversation was complimentary and formal. Tukuaho reminded his Fijian relative of the romantic legend that connected their families. Ratu Lala pressed him to make the bond closer by paying him a visit. They were both so painfully shy that even this stilted conversation would have been impossible unless I had stayed to interpret their languages to each other.

I have spoken already of the music and poetry of the page 378present day. As in most primitive countries, both words and music are the work of the same hand. The modern music has adopted the harmonies and cadence of the European compositions which the composers have heard, but it retains a distinctly native character, widely different though it is from the form of the ancient melodies. The songs are all sung in four-part chorus without accompaniment. The poetry is uninteresting in that it generally treats of scenery and flowers, seldom of the drama of life, never of the drama of love.

Of traditionary poetry little remains. The admirable efforts of the Rev. J. E. Moulton came too late to rescue the stores of legendary lore that passed away with the advent of Christianity, but the purely historical traditions that have been rescued, and which form the basis for the early history of the people, may be relied upon as having been correctly handed down. I had a curious instance of the durability of tradition. While conducting the native newspaper in Fiji, I took some trouble to collect and preserve the fragments of historical poetry that were still remembered, and invited contributions from the whole native community. At the same time I sent to press some fragments that were published in a missionary book about 1860. Among the contributions received in response to my appeal was a poem of the murder of Koroitamana (circa 1825). It had been gathered from the mouth of a very old woman of Bau. My native subeditor recognised it as being the same as one of the fragments from the missionary book, and brought me the printer's proof. Here, then, was an opportunity of comparing versions of the same poem taken thirty-three years page 379apart. The poem contained five or six stanzas of ten lines, and in all these there were but two differences of one word each.

The ancient monuments of Tonga have an interest of their own, since they are the rare efforts of a people who build their houses and temples of materials no more enduring than grass. The tombs of the Tui Tonga, described by so many travellers, are in the ordinary form of the Polynesian malae, a quadrilateral mound faced by huge blocks of stone, rising sometimes in terraces to a height of 20 feet. From the account left to us by the first missionaries of the funeral of Mumui in the year 1797, we know that each of these mounds contains in its exact centre the body of a dead king. The tombs are now so overgrown with forests that it is almost impossible to photograph them. Banyan-trees have sprouted on the terraces, and have bored their roots into every crevice, covering the stones with a lacework of tendrils which, year by year, force great blocks asunder, till the form of the terraces is almost obliterated. I tried to persuade a leading man of Mua to clear away the forest and preserve the tombs; but I found that even in these days the tradition of the tabu is strong enough to make this a sacrilege. The rule was, that after a body was laid to rest, Nature should be allowed to shroud it from the vulgar gaze, and that no foot should trample the hallowed ground until the death of a successor. When this happened, the people reverently cleared the whole ground, and built a new tomb, and practised the extraordinary funeral rites that have been so minutely described by Mariner. But now that the office of Tui Tonga has been abolished, the tombs will never again be cleared page 380until their site has been forgotten by posterity, or they have themselves crumbled away into a shapeless mound.

Besides these tombs, there is an older monument concerning which no tradition has been preserved. It stands upon land which is the peculiar property of the Tui Tonga, at a spot perhaps two furlongs from the beach. It consists of two upright monoliths of hardened coral, neatly squared, and across them rests a similar stone mortised into their summits. Each of these stones must weigh at least fifty tons. I climbed them and found upon the top of the cross stone a cup-like depression, very carefully cut. The only tradition preserved, is that the stones are the property of the Tui Tonga, and are called Haamonga, but their meaning is now forgotten. I carefully examined the surrounding ground for a sign of excavation, but there was none; yet I believe that one may argue from analogy that these stones were set on end by inclined planes of earth as heavy house-posts are sometimes raised to this day. Probably Stonehenge and all the similar monoliths of primitive peoples were raised in the same way. It once fell to my lot to build a native house which was to gratify the natural vanity of the mountaineers in Fiji by surpassing all other houses in size and magnificence. The main posts were enormous logs of vesi, a timber heavier than oak, and each of them must have weighed more than ten tons. I had the holes dug to receive them, and lined them with two feet of stones to prevent the trees from driving farther into the earth than the measured depth. Then I borrowed some strong tackleblocks and ropes, and summoned all the able-bodied men of the district to help in lifting them. I carefully explained page 381the use of the tackle, and tried to get them into their places; but a council of elders sat on the case, arid flatly declined to use it. There was only one way, they said, of raising heavy weights, and that was the way of their fathers. What could one lone white man do against an army of pig-headed ancestor worshippers? I gave in and watched them. They spent the first day in getting stout logs with forked tops. With these they built a solid platform sloping upwards to a height of 15 feet above the holes. Then they fastened strong vines to the end of the logs, and rolled them to the base of the inclined plane. Butt-end first, they dragged them inch by inch along the platform—100 men on either vine—until the logs lay at length horizontal, with their bodies projecting over the platform, above the hole. Then the council of elders sat on them, literally and metaphorically, and had them shifted an inch or two to the side. When they were satisfied, two men with axes hacked at the logs that formed the end of the platform. One by one these snapped, until, as the supports were cut away, the great butt-end overbalanced, and the huge log began to tip up. Its head rose to an angle of 45°, and then with a crash and a deep thud it shot down into the hole, and then men swarmed up and fastened vines to its summit by which it was easily hauled into position. I must say, in parenthesis, that I was unlucky enough to intervene at this juncture with my block-and-tackle. I made it fast to a cross-beam lashed to two trees, but no sooner had my twenty men begun to strain upon the rope than the beam snapped like a watch-spring, and swept the council of elders into the hole; so that, until this accident is for-page 382gotten, the primitive method of raising weights is likely to prevail in that district. I asked the old men what they did with heavier weights still, and they immediately answered, "We make the platform of earth, and dig it away to make the log tip up." No doubt, when the log or stone is on end, they dig away the platform, throwing the earth into its old position, so that no trace remains. Having seen the whole process, I shall continue to believe that Stonehenge was built like this, until some one offers a better explanation.

There is a legend that the Haamonga stones were brought by the god Maui in a gigantic canoe from Uea (Wallace Island), and that you may see there great holes in the rock whence they were quarried. A European even assured me that the stone is of a kind not found in Tonga at all. This part of the story at least is not true, for the stone is mere coral, hardened by exposure, of exactly the same quality as the reef close by.

In discussing the peculiarities of man I have altogether neglected the lower animals in Tonga. The only indigenous mammals were a small field-rat, a fruit-eating bat or flying fox, and a small cave-bat. The rat, having no enemies but man, swarmed throughout the islands: so numerous were they that it was a chieflike sport to shoot them in the paths with a bow and arrow. They have almost vanished now before the cats, dogs, and their voracious Norway cousin, and rat-shooting is now as extinct as bear-baiting in England.

The first foreign arrival was of course the pig. It is a popular fallacy that Captain Cook, among his other benefi-page 383cent actions, introduced the pig into the islands of the Pacific. It would be questionable whether, if he had done so, he would have deserved the gratitude of posterity; for the pig, in his rôle of universal scavenger, adds to the insanitary state of the village when alive, and when dead disagrees with his owners. For he was never an article of common diet, being killed only on occasions of ceremony, and then eaten to excess. So far from taking pigs to Tonga, Cook called there to obtain them in order to preserve his crew from the scourge that wrecked so many other expeditions, the scurvy. One hundred and thirty years before Cook's visit Tasman exchanged iron for pigs at Hihifo. But pigs had not then reached all the islands. Penrhyn was without them; and tradition tells of a time when even Fiji, so rich in all else, knew not the taste of pork. The story comes from Samoa, and its very incoherence seems to stamp it as having a core of true metal within its thick coating of alloy:—

"Many generations ago, when the world was still young, the crops in Upolu failed, and there was a great famine. And a man, who had a daughter married to the chief of Tutuila, called his son to him and said, 'The people are dying of hunger, and beside these two pigs we have naught to eat. If we kill these the neighbours will come in and take the meat from us, and afterwards we shall all perish together. But I have heard that in thy sister's land, in Tutuila, there is yet plenty. Now go to her and ask her for shelter for me and thy mother and thy brothers who made her marriage-feast for her, for we would live with her until there be again plenty in Upolu.'

"So the young man launched his canoe and sailed for his sister's village. It chanced that on that day the men of the village had taken a great haul of fish from the reef, and were laying it upon the beach to be shared out among the households. And as the canoe drew near, and the girl recognised her brother, she cried to the men to hide the fish in the house, 'lest these hungry ones take all!' And when her brother landed she said, 'Alas! that you seek relief from a fasting land. The famine with us is more grievous than with you.'

"Now the youth had seen the men hiding the fish as his canoe approached the shore, and he returned and told all to his father. There was bitter grief that day in their house when they knew that the daughter had treated them as strangers, and the old man would not be comforted, but said, 'If we are strangers, let us be strangers indeed.' So he made ready his canoe, and they prepared to leave their land for ever. They took with them the people of their house and their two hogs and food for four days, and sailed towards the west, caring not whether they reached a land or no. On the fourth day they reached Fiji, and beached their canoe on an uninhabited part of the shore. They let their hogs go in the bush and came to the village of the chief, who entertained them for many days. This people had no hogs, but when they made their feasts human flesh was the thöi (relish) of the yams. When they had dwelt there many months misfortune began to follow the chief's warriors. Many were slain and eaten of the enemy, and the chief had not tasted the flesh of men. Then the priests, speaking the voice of the gods, said that the strangers were bringing disaster upon page 385the warriors, and that only if they were killed and eaten would the doom of the tribe be averted. When the young Samoan heard this he took counsel with his father, and went to the chief and said, 'If I find thee a sweeter dainty than the flesh of men, will you spare our lives?' And the chief said Yes, for he thought that he knew all the foods that were in his island. So the youth went into the bush that now swarmed with hogs, the offspring of those he had set free there, and took a young hog and baked it secretly and presented it to the chief with due ceremony. And when the chief tasted it he was transported with delight, and swore that no more men should be eaten in his island as long as there were hogs to eat; and he felt a great gratitude towards the Samoan strangers, and would refuse them nothing. And they, being now weary of life in this barbarous country, asked a boon of him that he would give them a canoe, and let them depart to their own land. And when this was granted they asked that they might load her with all things necessary for a long voyage; and the chief granted them all kinds of provisions except hogs, for he would not allow any of this precious food to be removed from the country. But when they still entreated, he granted that they might take with them one cooked hog, but no live ones, lest they should give the animals to any of his enemies. So they killed a very large hog, and disembowelled it, and caught a sow big with young, and sewed up the living sow in the belly of the dead hog, and so carried them both to the canoe; for they rightly judged that in the famine the people of their land of Upolu had destroyed all the hogs. So they sailed, and reached their land in safety with the sow still living; page 386and there was great rejoicing, for there were no hogs in the island. And from this sow was the whole island replenished."

Some writers have remarked upon the Polynesian word for pig—puaka or vuaka—as being a proof that the pigs were first introduced by the Portuguese. There are, however, other words of Melanesian origin for the animal in Fiji-nngō and vore-that show the animal to have been known in the Pacific by others than the Malayo-Poly-nesians. It is most probable that the name is a mere coincidence, and that the people brought their pigs to the Pacific with them. The name may even be onomatopœic.

The pig of the Pacific is long-snouted, humpbacked, lean, and out-at-elbows. He seems to have forgotten such of the decencies as may be traditionary among his civilised cousins, and will eat putrid flesh and other things that are unmentionable. He is, besides, stricken with a deep melancholy, from which neither the sunshine nor the cloud of flies in which he passes his existence can rouse him.

Domestic poultry must also have come to the Pacific with the ancestors of the present Polynesians. The Tongan name moa and the Fijian toa are of course onomatopœic. The Maories, already possessing the word to denote domestic fowls, applied it to the great wingless birds they saw on their arrival in New Zealand; for the moa in their eyes was simply a hen on a gigantic scale.

Then came the dogs. The name kuli has given rise to a popular delusion that the first dog was a colley, but this satisfying theory will not withstand the fact that the accent of the native name falls on the ultimate, and that dogs were called kuli as early as 1777, before sheep-dogs were generally known as colleys, the dogs in the Pacific at that date being not colleys at all. The more ancient Fijian name for dog is tui, but the word kuli is in use in all parts of that group that have been affected by Tongan immigration. Captain Cook found no dogs in Tonga in 1773, but on his return four years later he noticed numbers of dogs, "commonly of a sallow colour, small and pretty, nearly resembling the Pomeranian dog," which the natives declared they had lately obtained from Fiji. Whence the Fijians acquired them will now never be known; but, since the dingos or native dogs of Australia and New Guinea are very unlike the animals described by Cook, it seems probable that they are late introductions, landed from some vessel the tradition of page 388whose visit has now been forgotten. Vessels from Manilla and the East Indies probably visited Vanualevu for sandalwood at intervals throughout the eighteenth century, recording their visit in their log-book, but not thinking it worth while to report their discoveries on their return to port. In one of these the first dogs may have been landed. It is perhaps safe to assume that animals whose names are onomatopœic are indigenous, and that those that are called by a corruption of a foreign name are recent introductions. A curious instance of the latter kind of nomenclature is to be found in Rotuna and the Gilbert Islands, where a dog is called a kamia, the elegant native conversion of the homely "Come'ere" with which the first dog was addressed by his illiterate master. The natives fled in terror from the new monster, and the sailor called it off, little thinking that he was adding a new word to the language of the island.

Little less curious is the origin of the Fijian name for cattle. The first cattle brought to Tonga were presented by Cook to Finau at Haapai. The two animals were pointed out to him as a bull and a cow (bulu mo kau). "When they were afterwards shown to the Fijians, whose conjunction is not mo, the names were taken to be one word; and thenceforward all cattle, irrespective of sex, were called bulumokau, the sex being distinguished by suffixing the words for male or female. The ridiculous word is applied even to beef, and by the Melanesian servants domiciled in Fiji to mutton, when qualified by the word sipi (sheep). The Tongans have now forgotten the kau, and speak only of the bulu, adding the words tagata or fefine to denote the sex. Thus with them a cow page 389is a female bull (koe bulu fefine). D'Entrecasteaux, who visited Tonga fourteen years after Cook, found that the existence of the cattle left by that navigator was so far forgotten that the natives did not know which island they were on, if indeed they were alive at all. They were then spoken of as puaka tute (Cook's pigs). Cook himself records the fact that the new animals excited but little interest. This indifference still survives in the unwillingness of the people to keep cattle, in spite of the excellent pasture in the island and the large profits to be made from the sale of milk. Almost every Tongan owns a horse; scarcely half a dozen keep cows. A cow cannot be ridden, and it must be watered and milked with absolute regularity or it will run dry; and of all the products of civilisation, regular routine is the most hateful to the Polynesian.

I have spoken elsewhere of horses. The ancestors of the present breed were brought from New Zealand some forty years ago, but through promiscuous breeding they have dwindled to the size of the American mustang,—hard wiry ponies, without either mouth or paces, full of tricks and ill-temper, but capable of covering immense distances without fatigue. They vary in price from a few shillings to £7 or £8. The Government might easily have improved the breed by making gelding compulsory, or by enforcing the horse-tax; as it is, the country is overrun with wretched beasts, covered with sores, whose only use is to keep the grass short. I remember one of the police magistrates applying to the Government for an impounded horse,—" not that I may ride it, but because I am old, and there is no one to weed my enclosure."

One result of the introduction of horses has been the almost entire destruction of the bread-fruit-tree throughout Tonga. The glutinous sap is irresistible to horses, and they greedily tear off the bark as far up the trunk as they can reach, of course killing the tree.

The men ride like centaurs, but, unlike centaurs, they have no hands. As a consequence, the Tongan pony has no mouth. Almost as soon as the boys can walk they are galloping barebacked, with no bridle but a rope knotted round the horse's nose. Grown men generally use a saddle, of some kind without girths or surcingle, and too often without stuffing. The women have not yet taken to riding like their cousins in Hawaii, who have even converted the European women of the place to trousers and a man's saddle.

The people are as cruel to their animals as the Egyptian donkey-boys. A sore back is never thought a reason for sparing a horse. I have seen ponies returning from the plantations in the evening with a basket of yams slung on either side with a sinnet cord, which was cutting deep into a bleeding raw on the withers. I stopped the man and tried to convince him of his brutality. He was simply incapable of comprehending the idea of cruelty to animals,—an idea which, after all, is only found among the stricter Buddhists and the Anglo-Saxons, and with the latter is but the growth of a single century.

The wheel traffic of Tonga has increased enormously. Every man who can afford it has a cart, the richer natives American buggies. In wet weather the wheels cut the soft grass-roads into rivers of mud, in which the wheels are logged to the axle-trees. On such roads the heaviest page 391cart is noiseless, and so after nightfall they are compelled by law to carry a light. The law is satisfied by the economical expedient of a smouldering brand, visible no farther than a lighted cigar.

There is little bird-life in the islands, but two of the species show remarkable peculiarities. The kaka, a green parrot common to all the islands of Fiji, is in Tonga confined to the little island of Eua. Though tame parrots have been taken across the narrow strait that separates Eua from Tongatabu, and have escaped in the larger island, they have never bred there. Wallace has recorded the fact that land-birds will not cross a deep-water strait, however narrow; but no one has offered a plausible explanation of the arrival of the kaka in Eua without touching at Tongatabu. The Eua species differs slightly from the green parrot of Fiji.

Stranger still is the presence of the megapodius (malao) in Niuafoou (Boscawen Island), which, if one may judge from the absence of a fringing reef and the volcanic nature of the soil, is of more recent formation than the others. It is covered with the large mounds in which this energetic little bird lays its eggs, leaving them to be hatched by the sun if they be fortunate enough to escape the eyes of the people or the pigs of the place. These eggs, enormous when compared with the size of the bird, have been for centuries regarded as a delicacy of Tongatabu, and have been exported thither in every canoe sailing southward during the breeding season. I was told (with what truth I know not, for I tried it and failed) that the eggs thus taken to Tongatabu are of ten hatched artificially and the young malao reared. The jungle of the southern page 392islands differs little from that of Niuafoou. Whence comes it, then, that a bird so hardy in its breeding arrangements should be confined to that one small island ? and how is it that a bird whose eastern limit is the Solomon Islands should be found in Polynesia at all, after skipping all the intermediate islands of Melanesia? If it was brought thither by man, of what strange story of the migration of races is it the only surviving record? This is not Nature's only caprice in respect of this strange bird. Its enormous egg, its untiring industry in mound-building, its unnatural indifference to its young, its wariness on foot, and its wonderful stupidity when forced to take to flight, give to it and its allied species an exclusive position among birds. The natives of New Guinea catch and tame the young by the simple expedient of building a fence round the mound. The little creatures, hatched by the warmth of the decaying leaves among which the mother lays them, scratch their way to the surface fully equipped for their fight with Nature, and are easily caught within the circle of the fence. In British New Guinea, where the megapodius was often our only animal food, it was some time before I learned the secret of shooting him. When he first sees you he runs like a pheasant, stopping every twenty yards or so to reconnoitre. You stalk him, but find that he always keeps a few yards out of shot, until you lose him altogether among the trees. The only way to make sure of him is to run after him as soon as he sees you. He then discovers that his legs are not fast enough, and reluctantly takes to wing, flaps awkwardly to the nearest bough, and there, secure in his commanding position, and proud of the page 393mighty effort he has made, he sits blinking at you until you get within easy shot. This fatuous behaviour is not likely to bring about his extermination, for the natives of New Guinea prize his eggs so much as a delicacy that they are most unwilling to kill him.

The Haamonga monument.