Page:Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, New York, 1860.djvu/71

 INDTJSTEIAL PEODUCE, ETC. 49 Other vegetables, of immense value to the native, but yielding their benefit spontaneously, and without adding to his toil, will be noticed in connexion with the parts where they severally most abound. The agricultural implements of the Fijians are few and simple ; yet a notice of them may please the curious. A tool, lancet-shaped, and about a yard long, made of hard wood, is used in breaking down and clearing away the brushwood and coarse grass, which, when dry, is burnt. The ground thus cleared is ready for the digging-stick — the plough of Fiji. This tool is generally made of a young mangrove tree, not larger or longer than the handle of an ordinary hay-fork. The bark is kept on, except at the end which is used for digging, and which is tapered off on one side after the shape of a quill tooth-pick. In digging, this flattened side is kept downwards. "When preparing a piece of ground for yams, a number of men are employed, divided into groups of three or four. Each man being furnished with a digging-stick, they drive them into the ground so as to enclose a circle of about two feet in diameter. When, by repeated strokes, the sticks reach the depth of eighteen inches, they are used as levers, and the mass of soil between them is thus loosened and raised. Two or three lads follow with short sticks, and break the clods, which are afterwards pulverized by hand, and formed into mounds, in the summits of which the yam-set is placed. Thus the best use is made of the light soil, and the training of the vines facilitated, which run from mound to mound, until nothing is seen but an expanse of matted verdure. Before this is the case, the land has to be weeded several times ; an operation which is accomplished by means of a tool used like a Dutch hoe, the workman squatting so as to bring the handle nearly level with the ground. The blade used formerly to be made of a bone from the back of a turtle, or a plate of tortoise-shell, or the valve of a large oyster, or large kind of pimia. An oval iron blade or toy spades are fast superseding these. Among the taro beds of the windward group I saw a large dibble in use, eight feet long, and the lower part eighteen inches in circumference at about two feet from the point, to which it tapered. A pruning knife was made of a plate of tortoise-shell lashed to the end of a rod ten feet long. This implement was also a mark of rank. But Sheffield blades have long since taken its place, and hatchets, plane- irons, spades, and butchers' knives have produced a great change, and given the present generation a vast superiority over those preceding it, in the facilities thus gained for producing food. An annual or triennial change of their planting grounds, with occa-