42 



HAWAIIAN STONE IMPLEMENTS. 



I am fortunately able to show how the Hawaiian poi pounder was made, and it 

 is probable that this was the most ancient method. In Hilo in 1888 I found an old 

 native at work with his son fashioning poi pounders for his neighbors and one of the 

 photographs I then took is shown in Fig. 39. Sitting on the porch of his house on a 



mat (no longer Hawaiian 

 but Chinese), clad in for- 

 eign clothes, father and son 

 still retained the native pos- 

 ture and the native methods 

 I had seen a quarter of a 

 century before when a grass 

 house and stone platform 

 had served as background 

 to a bronzed figure clad only 

 in the unobtrusive malo or 

 clout, working in the same 

 way for the same end. Only 

 a hard silicious pebble arm- 

 ed with perseverence and pa- 

 tience made produ(5ls fairly 

 shown in the plates and fig- 

 ures. Now it is said the 

 modern pounders are often 

 turned in a lathe,* and these 

 substitutes are used by the 

 Chinese to prepare the Ha- 

 waiian's national food! 



Not seldom when much 

 of the hard rough shaping 

 is done the work must be 

 abandoned because a flaw is discovered. Two such failures are shown in Fig. 40. The 

 first (No. 8815) looks almost like a model of an eroded mountain for the hard pebble 

 has cut away the stone much as the torrent washes out the valleys. The first stage 

 was nearly finished. In the second example (No. 8043) more progress had been made: 

 the concavity of the sides was marked and the face was nearly complete when the 

 great crack from side to side appeared and the disappointed workman threw the block 

 on to the refuse heap whence it found its way into a stone wall where the reje6led stone 

 was seledled from the whole wall for the lesson it could teach. 



* I have recently seen tolerable poi pounders cut with a short-handled axe. It took nearly a day, and the result was rough. 



[374] 



FIG. 



HAWAIIAN MULLER OF CORAL ROCK. 



