Things Perhaps Forgotten. 189 



houses, so to speak, the things thrown away by their owners as unfashionable or super- 

 seded by some better invention, we should gain footnotes that would perhaps be worth 

 more than all the text ! The things that turn up in kitchen middens were refuse once 

 but now are oracles of history, truer, if carefully read, than most that is called history. 



Idle is it to lament over things we ma}^ have lost, when we shall doubtless omit 

 to mention some of the things known to others as well as to ourselves but forgotten 

 in the gathering of the household utensils old and new, that should find place in an 

 old Hawaiian house of the better sort. Even when we plead guilty of passing by the 

 stone implements, the feather-work treasures, the baskets and mats, on the plea that 

 we have told all we know about them before, and again speak slightly about tools for 

 kapa making which were most important things about the house ; about the weapons 

 that from the earliest times must have been the title deeds to the ownership of the 

 house itself; of the games of which the implements were not onlj' in the house but 

 often so dear to the residents that the}- were placed together with the choicest posses- 

 sions in the burial cave where the bones of the departed were hidden: because all these 

 things are so important in themselves that the}- must be treated more fully bj- them- 

 selves than they properl}' could as mere furniture to a house. Whatever excuse may 

 be brought forward, there are other things that come under none of these heads and 

 should in au}^ liberal plan be described with other furniture, but which may be for- 

 gotten, that it behooves us to search carefully for what may have been overlooked. 



Fibres played so large a part in the economy of Hawaiian life that doubtless in 

 most houses we should find the scrapers shown in Fig. 175, those on the left made of 

 the pearly and hard shell of a bivalve ( Ulii kahioloiia papaiia)^ and the rest, the far 

 more common ones, made from the bones of the carapace of the large turtle common 

 in these waters ( Ulii kahiolona kiialiouii). These were used not onlj- to clean the fibres 

 of the olona, but also to remove the outer bark in kapa making, and even as the 

 strigil of the ancients to scrape the human body. Used in so many ways they were 

 doubtless common in and about the houses. With the scrapers went the Laau 

 hahi o/ona, a strip of wood six to eight feet long and three to five inches wide, with one 

 surface slightly convex and smooth. Like the scrapers these laau were used for other 

 fibre than olona, as waoke, niamaki, etc., so there was generally one of these stuck in 

 the thatch somewhere about the house. The method of using is shown in Plate XV of 

 this volume, representing a native scraping olona for spinning net cord. 



While a fisherman would doubtless have many of the implements of his calling 

 in and about his house, such as fishing sticks, traps, nets, hooks, etc., many of the Alii 

 were also fishermen {e.g., the Kamehameha famih') and kept their choicer imple- 

 ments in their dwellings, especially ipii Ic'^i (Fig. 176), a container of fish hooks or 



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