REEF-KNOT NETS. 83 



secure a perfected and scientific statistical service in tliis country. 

 This movement commenced during the closing days of the last 

 Congress^ through memorials from boards of trade, presented by 

 the National Board of Trade, asking that the question of the es- 

 tablishment of a permanent Census Office be considered by the 

 Secretary of the Interior and a report made to the Fifty-second 

 Congress. The matter is therefore open for consideration by the 

 public and by Congress, and, whether a permanent statistical serv- 

 ice is provided for or not, great good must come from the discus- 

 sion, and ultimately the faulty features of the present system be 

 removed. 



REEF-KNOT NETS. 



By WILLIAM CHUECHLLL. 



AT the bottom of textile industries net-meshing appears to 

 precede even such simple weaving as the making of mats of 

 grass and bark. Not only is it the earliest of the textile arts, but 

 it is even more prominently an unchanged art through all the 

 stages of development which have culminated in the Jacquard 

 loom. Ancient or modern, laboriously made by hand or the 

 product of intricate machinery, the mesh knot is practically un- 

 modified in the nets of the steam trawler and the naked savage. 

 It seems, indeed, one of the few contrivances of human ingenuity 

 which came early to perfection and have not proved susceptible 

 of any improvement in all the succeeding ages. 



It may, then, be not without interest to present a radical vari- 

 ant of the common mesh knot as noticed in general use among a 

 considerable people in the western Pacific, together with such 

 notes as are available to show a wider distribution of this knot. 



In Avestern New Britain, on the coast of Dampier Strait, facing 

 New Guinea, where the Papuan characteristics are most strongly 

 impressed upon the Melanesian type, the writer noticed the net- 

 ting of a large seine and was attracted by the unfamiliar motions 

 of the old women engaged in the work. Closer examination dis- 

 closed the fact that every knot in the mesh was of the sort known 

 as the reef or square knot, in which the four ends come out in 

 pairs, each pair on one side of the bight or loop of the other pair. 

 As nothing could be more widely dissimilar from the ordinary 

 mesh knot, an effort — and a successful one — was made to induce 

 the netters to communicate their art, which is here presented 

 with figures which may aid to a clear comprehension of the 

 method of manufacture employed. These figures give a view of a 

 net in process of construction, with detailed drawings of the foun- 

 dation knot and of the successive stages in forming the mesh knot. 



