4 INTRODUCTION. 



a man sleeping on his own domain could not roll over in his slumber 

 without committing trespass, yet each of these sites has its name. On 

 the other hand there are islands of great area which have no names at 

 all whereby they may be designated as geographic units.* It may 

 well be the case that Easter Island had no collective name. For our 

 own convenience, however, we shall use Easter Island and Rapanui 

 interchangeably. 



3. Utterly beyond our comprehension, since apparently so utterly 

 beyond the present capacity of the islanders, the enduring memorials 

 of workers in cyclopean stone are preserved in the South Sea. Without 

 pretending to offer a list of such structures we note a few of the principal 

 buildings of that nature: the Fale o le Fe'e in the mountains of 'Upolu 

 behind Apia, the great trilithonof Tonga, the scarped mountain erections 

 on Rapaiti, the massive walls of Metalianim Harbor in the Carolines, 

 the rows of pillars on Tinian in the Mariannes. Least comprehensible 

 of all such works are the stone statues of Easter Island, rude masses of 

 tufa-crowned human shapes mounted as termini upon platforms along 

 the edges of the cliffs. We find them in all stages of execution from 

 the partly hewn block in the quarries to the monument finished and 

 erected in its place. They are claimed by the traditions of the islanders 

 as the work of their forefathers down to quite recent generations. Yet, 

 despite the tradition, we can not see how a people unacquainted with 

 metals could hew these great masses of hard volcanic rock ; nor can we 

 see how, without mechanical assistance of which they had no knowledge, 

 they could lift these weights over the crater rim, transport them for 

 considerable distances, and rear them on end. 



4. No South Sea language has attained to the stage of letters. In 

 the absence of graphic symbols the memories of the past have in every 

 case been the treasure of the memory of the present. The only record 

 has been in the human mind; the island sages are their own books. 

 But in Rapanui we have a collection of wooden billets, each bearing 

 carefully incised figures neatly ordered in rows after a modified system 

 of boustrophedon. At once we jump to the conclusion that these hylo- 

 glyphs contain writing; therefore, if written, they may be read. Again 

 a problem. In the first volume of the Journal of the Polynesian Society 

 (1892) Dr. A. Carroll, of New South Wales, undertook to read them. 

 The reading was far too glib; it was a record of obscure events upon 

 the slopes of the Andes. Called upon to explain the principles of inter- 

 pretation, Dr. Carroll vanishes from the record. Paymaster Thomson 

 was an eye-witness of the reading of the hyloglyphs by an Easter 

 Islander. He has to acknowledge that a fraud was practised upon him 



*"Fiir grossere umfassende geographische Einheiten, wie Buchten, Meeresarme, Meeres- 

 strassen, Gebirge und ahnliches, besitzen die Eingeborenen keine Namen, wenigstens die 

 Melanesier. Ihre geographischen Namen sind individuell, kantonal, lokal begrenzt." 

 Capt. Georg Friederici, "Beitrage zur Volker- und Sprachenkunde von Deutsch-Neuguinea," 

 page 10. 



