Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/69

Rh themselves to be far superior to the Australians, and fully the equals of the Polynesian races. They grow cocoanuts and bread-fruit, and cultivate various kinds of yam, sweet potato, bananas, and sugar-cane. Though possessing, for the most part, only stone axes, they clear the forest to make their plantations, which they carefully fence round to keep out the wild pigs. Looking at these clearings, at their houses, their canoes, their implements, weapons, and ornaments often elaborately carved, we must, as Dr. Maclay remarks, be struck with astonishment at the great patience and skill displayed by these savages. Their chief implement, the axe, consists of a hard gray, green, or white stone, made smooth and sharp by long grinding and polishing. A piece of the stem of a tree which has a branch passing off at an angle, something like the figure 7, is hewed off, and upon the branch, which has been cut off short and shaven at the top, the stone is laid horizontally, and bound fast with split rattans or tough bark. Such an instrument requires to be used with great skill, only to be attained by practice, or the stone will be broken without producing any result. These savages can, however, with a stone axe having a cutting edge only two inches broad, fell a tree-trunk of twenty inches diameter, or carve really fine figures on a post or spear. Each adult man possesses one such axe, but in every village there are usually one or two larger two-handed axes, which are about three inches broad. These are considered exceedingly valuable, and are only used for cutting large trees for canoes or other important work. Fragments of flint and shells are used for finishing carved work and cutting the ornamental patterns on bamboo boxes, as well as for making combs, spoons, arrows, and other small articles. For cutting meat and vegetables a kind of chisel of bone and knives of bamboo are made use of. On the northwest and southwest coasts, where the people have long been in communication with Malay traders, they have iron tools and weapons, and cultivate also maize and a little rice and millet, and have the papaya as an additional fruit and vegetable; and they also grow tobacco, of which they make huge cigars. At Dorey they have learned to work iron, and make swords and choppers as well as iron points to their arrows and spears.

The daily food of these people consists of some of the vegetables already named, of which they have a pretty constant supply, together with fruits, fish, and occasionally the flesh of the wild pig, the cuscus, or of birds caught in snares or shot with arrows. They also eat shellfish, lizards, and almost every kind of large insect, especially beetles and their larvæ, which are eaten either raw or cooked. Having no salt, they mix sea-water with that in which they cook their food, and this is so highly esteemed that the people of the hills carry away bamboos full of salt-water whenever they visit the coast.

The plantations are usually made at some distance inland for safety, and, after the ground is cleared and fenced by the men, the cultivation is left almost wholly to the women, who go every day to weed and