NEW GUINEA AND ITS INHABITANTS. 59 



themselves to be far superior to the Australians, and fully the equals of 

 the Polynesian races. They grow cocoanuts and bread-fruit, and cul- 

 tivate 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 elabo- 

 rately carved, we must, as Dr. Maclay remarks, be struck with astonish- 

 ment 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, how- 

 ever, 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 shell- 

 fish, lizards, and almost every kind of large insect, especially beetles 

 and their larva?, 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 



