Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/188

178 each bamboo becomes an Æolian flute of many tones. This beautiful habit may well be of native origin. But it is curious to compare it with an early South American description from the province of Picara, now in Columbia. There, at the entrances of the caciques' houses, were platforms surrounded with stout canes, on which (in the fashion of the Dayaks) were set up heads of enemies, "looking fierce with long hair, and their faces painted in such sort as to appear like those of devils. In the lower part of the canes there are holes through which the wind can pass, and when it blows, there is a noise which sounds like the music of devils."

When an art is practised upon some material which belongs exclusively, or in a large degree, to the place where the art is found, the probability that it was invented on the spot becomes almost a certainty. No one would dispute the claim of the Peruvians or Chilians to have discovered the use, for manure, of the huanu, or, as we call it, "guano," which their exceptionally rainless climate has allowed to accumulate on their coasts, nor the claim of the dwellers in the hot regions near the Gulf of Mexico to have found out how to make their chocollatl from a native plant.

On the other hand, when tribes are found living among the very materials which are turned to account by simple arts elsewhere, and yet are ignorant of those arts, we have good ethnological evidence as to their condition when they first settled in the place where we become acquainted with them. In investigating the difficult problem of Polynesian civilization, this state of things often presents itself, not uniformly, but in a partial, various way, that gives us a glimpse here and there of the trains of events that must have taken place, in different times and places, to produce the complex result we have before us. It is clear that a Malayo-Polynesian culture, proved by the combined evidence of language, mythology, arts, and customs, has spread itself over a great part of the Southern Islands, from the Philippines down to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to