KUKAfUMOKU. 7 



purchased in 1822 b}' the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, by whom it was soon after- 

 wards handed over to the Natural History Society and formed the basis of their present museum. 

 The Ethnological portion of the Allan Museum is practicalh- all that is now retained, and that portiou 

 is of extreme value from the fact that the objects in it were collected long before the native handicraft 

 had become debased. The examples from New Zealand and the South Sea Islands are particularly 

 fine and there is every reason to believe that many of them were obtained in Captain Cook's Voyages. 

 In a Synopsis of the Newcastle Museum (1827) the editor, G. T. Fox, in describing the contents 

 of the Allan Museum, speaks as follows of these objects; ' Many of the.se articles are understood to 

 have been collected during the voyages of Captain Cook, from .some of the inscriptions on them, as well 



FIG. 4. EVli OF WICKF:K work with .shell .VNl) Fl-;ATnHK.S. 



as from the title of Mr. Allan's MS. catalogue of his museum.' This jiarticular mask [idol] is numbereil 

 16 in the Ethnology section of the Allan Museum, and is thus described by Fox in his Synopsis, under 

 the heading 'Owliyhee, and other Sandwich Islands'; '16. Indian God or idol. Has been covered with 

 the red feathers of the Hook-billed Red Creeper (Certhia vestiaria, Gnd. and Lath.), which are also 

 u.sed by the natives for ornamenting their cloaks whilst intermixed with the olive feathers of another 

 species (Certhia obscura'). Similar but better specimens of this idol are in the Pjritish Museum,' " 



Little can be added to Mr. Gill'.s accotmt, but I may call attention to the elongated 

 neck and the fact that tlie descendants of the makers of this image in after years called 

 the ladies of the American Mission, certainly not respectfully, aiocoe^ long-necked. 

 In matters of worship consistency is generally de trop. 



In the hitman hair of the Pitt-Rivers specimen at Oxford we may note a resem- 

 blance to one in the British Museum (shown in Fig. 26, p. 34 ); but the present specimen 



[441 1 



