Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/402

368 and human-form. In the one (Fig. 12) the head is still clearly recognizable as human, in spite of its very prolonged beak-like snout. In the other (Fig. 13) it is only saved from being non-human by the presence of a well-defined nose lying along the ridge of the "beak."

Without multiplying instances, I think it is fair to recognize as evident that the excessive prognathism which characterizes so many of the representations of human form in Solomon Island art, is due to fusion of bird and human motifs, and that the composite conventional result is intimately associated with and, indeed, a product of a cult of the frigate-bird. The cult itself, no doubt, is concerned with the problem either of securing safety at sea, or of promoting good luck in fishing, or, more probably, both.

In the paper above referred to, I carried the point further, and showed that the conventional highly prognathous type so arrived at has tended to dominate the would-be realistic art in the Solomon Islands. In very many of the carvings and drawings of the human head which are intended to be realistic, we can recognize to a greater or lesser extent the "canoe-prow god" type, and it would appear that the Solomon Island artists have been obsessed by this traditional modified type and that their would-be realistic renderings of the human form are largely dominated by it. One of the instances which I figured in support of this view is an actual portrait-study of one native of New Georgia by another.

To return to Easter Island. In this conventionalized rendering of the human form in the Solomon Islands, we find all the characteristics above enumerated in describing the monolithic statues of Rapanui. They are not all necessarily associated together in any one specimen, but they are all sufficiently frequently present in the Solomon Island figures to suggest the probability of the resemblance observable in the art-products of these two widely separated