iU > 1902 



PREFACE. 



In selecting the Stone Implements of the Ancient Hawaiians for the subject of the next chapter 

 of what I had some years since intended should be a history of Hawaii, or rather of the Hawaiians 

 before the advent of other and ver}- different racial influences, it may be fair to explain to my 

 readers, almost at the start, my method in this fragmentary edition of such information about old 

 Hawaii and its customs as I have been able to gather during the past thirty-six years. And here 

 I must be pardoned for thrusting a personality into what I greatly desire to make a clear and 

 impersonal statement of facts. 



When I came to these islands a young man full of enthusiasm, fresh from the teachings of 

 Agassiz, Gray, Wyman and Cooke, eager to study nature in all her aspedls, unbiased by theory, 

 only anxious to learn, I found a land where traces of a native civilization were not all effaced. The 

 American Mi-ssion had labored a little more than forty years and the results of their work were still 

 vigorous: the missionary homes still existed, oases in the outlying districts, where I could talk 

 with venerable men and women who had landed in 1820 when the young son and successor of 

 Kamehanleha had ca.st aside all that his ancestors had held sacred in religion, and was not yet ready 

 to assume new responsibilities, — indeed he hardly gave much thought to the great change that was 

 impending. One era was at an end, another was on the threshold. Hitherto intercourse with for- 

 eigners had but little modified the native ways of living. There had been no interruption of the ancient 

 worship although it had been for years falling into mild decay. The admirable unwritten system 

 of law regarding laud tenure, water rights, fishing privileges, and the .stern but generally beneficial 

 kapu were almost unimpaired, and that little band of missionaries that went like Joshua's spies 

 to view the land, and whose story is so charmingly told in Ellis' Toi/r of Haivaii, found people 

 and things much the same as did the wrecked Spaniards when they knelt on the Hawaiian beach 

 three centuries before. 



I never had the pleasure of meeting William Ellis, but I have corresponded with him. 

 I have met and lived with most of the other early missionaries, and if they were perhaps more 

 anxious to remove tho.se obstacles to eternal health which threatened the interesting people they 

 had come to save, than to study the past history and work conne(5ted so intimately with what 

 they considered a fallen state, their desires were sincere and unselfish, and they were always ready 

 to place their journals at my disposal and to answer c[uestions which must at times have seemed to 

 them almost idle. 



Other sources of information, now closed forever, were then open to the traveler among the 

 Hawaiians. In the remote valleys the sound of the kapa beaters still echoed from the pali, and the 

 ancient fabric was still worn to some extent. I have gone to rest in a grass house by the light of a 

 stone lamp filled with kukui oil, after my native hosts and I had conversed by the light of the more 

 primitive string of kukui nuts. I had for my guide on the island of Molokai a man who had oflRciated 

 as priest in the native temple whose ruins he was explaining to me. Mateo Kekuanaoa, the father 

 of two kings, and the most intelligent native I ever met; John li, Charles Kanaina (father of King 



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