New Guiftea Villages. 



51 



of them cannibals ordinarily or on occasion, with Polynesian settlements dotted along 

 the northern coast, and with dialers almost as many as the villages, small wonder that 

 the architecture seems fantastic and subject to no rule! Pile dwellings built out from 

 the marshy shore, much as the lake dwellers of central Europe built six thousand 

 years ago ; tree dwellings high up in the free growing trees of a tropical climate, and 



FIG. 44. NEW GUINEA VILLAGE. 



between these extremes almost every light and flimsy pattern of house building, from 

 the hut hardly large enough to shelter a single specimen of the naked people of the 

 Papuan race, to the communal house several hundred feet long gathering beneath its 

 huge roof people enough to fill a good sized village — as New Guinea villages go. We 

 could fill a scrap book with pictures of the bizarre struClures the explorer meets, but it 

 would be only a scrap book, and we must be content with a bit here and there seen 

 much as a bird maj^ be supposed to see houses in rapid flight. 



Even if we knew all about the ways of construction, the materials used and the 

 necessities governing the final result, this would not be the place to enlarge upon the 

 subject which might fill volumes. We can only glance here and there, with the aid 



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