158 COOK AND cook: the maho or mahagua 



de playa and niahaujo are applied respectively to Sterculia 

 pruriens, Helideres haruensis, and Muntingia calabura. The last 

 is called majaguilla in Venezuela, according to Ernst, who also 

 gives mijagua as a name of Anacardium rhinocarpus. Gomez 

 de la Maza gives macagua as a Cuban name of Pseudolmedia and 

 majaguin for Pavonia. All these trees have fibrous barks that 

 can be used for the same purposes as the maho bark. Muntingia 

 is very widely distributed and may be considered as replacing 

 the maho in the drier or more elevated regions of tropical Amer- 

 ica. A Quichua name for tough-barked trees is p-hancho or 

 pjancho. Muntingia is called ccarapjancho in the lower Uru- 

 bamba Valley, while a species of Heliocarpus is known as 

 llaosapjancho. 



From Colombia the names mamagua and maragua have been 

 recorded by Pittier,^ in relation to another fibrous-barked tree 

 of the mulberry family, Inophloeum armatum. In Costa Rica 

 and Panama, according to Pittier, the name majagua is not ap- 

 plied especially to the maho tree or its bark, but to any kind of 

 tough bark that can be used for tying. Yet majagiiita is given 

 as the Costa Rican name of Pavonia dasypetala, a plant that 

 furnishes a very tough fiber used by the Indians. 



NAMES OF THE MAHO IN POLYNESIA 



The tendency in many of the island languages is to sup- 

 press the consonants and reduce words to monosyllables, but 

 when the simplified Polynesian names of the maho (rnao, 7nau, 

 au, hau,fau, and vau, are brought together, the essential unity 

 of the series is apparent. For the tree itself the nearest ap- 

 proach in Polynesia to American forms of the name is moaua, 

 recorded from Easter Island, or marau, from New Guinea, but 

 mahu, mahui, mahoe, mahaga, mahini, mahae, maoa, inaharo, 

 mahore, 7nagoe, mageo, 7nalo, and many similar words, relate to 

 the operations of peeling, spreading, pounding, or rubbing the 

 bark, to bark cloth, or to ropes, strings, or strips of bark used 

 in tying or snaring, or in other ways that connect naturally 

 with the maho. 



2 Journ. Wash. Acad. Sci. 6: 114. 1916. 



