142 



Art. Yn.— A. Matsumura 



Fig. 63.— Hook 

 from the j aw 

 bone of fish, 

 used in holding 

 the house door. 

 Yap. 



bone of the leather jacket, a large fish which the 

 natives call koii (Fig. 03). 



Bamboo screens form outer walls, and the 

 building is partitioned into a sitting room, a bed- 

 room, etc., by means of timbers laid horizontally. 

 The size of the dwelling-house is roughly 20 by 

 8 ra. The house has a stone platform around it, 

 which is wider in front and behind. Since the gable 

 projects outward, the ground-plan of the dwelling 

 comes to form a hexagon with two longer sides 



(Fig. G4). This is one of 

 the pecuharities of archi- 

 tecture in Yap. The dwellings here 

 present, thus, a striking contrast to the 

 buildings in the East Caroline Islands 

 which are rough in structure, consisting 

 of only one room. 



Matting. — For sittir.g and lying upon 

 the islanders of Yap have nothing else 

 than mats plaited with coco -tree leaves. 

 In contrast with the l^uilding itself, such 

 mats seem altogether too simple ; but we 

 find the same in Palau, where the art 

 of building has reached a similar stage 

 of progress. In Yap, there is another kind of mat much prized 

 among the islanders, with regard to which F, W. Christian 

 writes : " There is yet another treasure highly prized in Yap, but 

 which from its comparative rarity is seldom bartered. It is a 

 coarse shaggy white mat resembling iiothing so much as goat or 

 dogskin ; it is made from the beaten- out bark of the kal or lemon 



O 



o 



o 



Fig. 64. — Ground-plan of a 

 dwelling-house in Y'ap. 



