52 Mat and Basket Weaving. 



planation of the way of wearing these rather uncouth garments, which are fast giving 

 place to the foreign cloth loose gowns, ma)- well be noticed. There are two distinct 

 ways of wearing them : either two mats, one in front, the other behind, are worn as 

 aprons and fastened around the waist with a coil of the interesting coco and pandanus 

 cord already described, a coil that is often sixty feet long (and Finsch reports one 

 fifty metres long), or a single mat is passed between the legs and the corners brought 

 over a similar girdle forming a sort of malo, an arrangement that would seem to pre- 

 clude any rapid running by the wearer. 



The thickness of the cord girdle increased with the rank of the wearer. There 

 were also in these mats (called //') patterns suited for men, others for women, some for 

 commoners, others for chiefs, all of which Dr. Kramer fully describes. These mats 

 were often given as presents, and in the early sixties some of the Marshall Islanders 

 made a large one suitable for a bed cover which they sent as a present to Kameha- 

 meha V in recognition of the good done for them by the missionaries from his 

 kingdom of Hawaii. On the vo3^age from Micronesia to Honolulu rats destroyed a 

 corner of the elaborate border, and the partial ruin was purchased b}- the writer and is 

 now in the Peabod}' Museum at Cambridge, Mass. When the use of mats for gar- 

 ments ceases, as it will very soon, it is questionable whether the}- will still be woven. 

 For table covers they are well suited, as well as for other purposes of domestic orna- 

 ment or use, and it would be a pity that the}- should be relegated to the class of lost 

 arts. It cannot be denied that mat weaving here, as elsewhere in the Pacific, is rapidly 

 declining, owing largely to the unwise method of instrudlion that has been in vogue 

 throughout the Pacific where the methods of Anglo-Saxon education have been forced 

 upon peoples generally unable to assimilate such intelledlual food. If the white men 

 had simply endeavored to make better specimens of the various races, saving what was 

 good in their work, gently eradicating the heathen tendencies, it seems possible that 

 many of the useful industries of the Pacific might have been saved from the list of 

 abandoned arts. The pandanus and makaloa might still be fashioned into fabrics which 

 would bring revenue to the makers and credit to the islands of the Great Ocean. 



Hawaiian I^auhala Mats.— Enough has already been described of the meth- 

 ods of other Pacific islanders perhaps to render superfluous any minute description of 

 the ways and means of the old Hawaiians in lauhala mat making. Doubtless it was 

 the oldest form of mat making on these islands, and fragments are found in the most 

 ancient burial caves quite like the mat work of the present day. No such work as 

 that just described from Micronesia was made here, perhaps because the use of 

 kapa for garments rendered their use for clothing unnecessary; but it must not be 

 supposed that the old Hawaiians did not make fine pandanus mats, for there are suffi- 



