382 JOURNAL OF THE WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES VOL. 13, No. 17 
Hawaii, one high up on Mauna Kea and the other at the bottom of 
the crater of Keanakakoi at Kilauea. Another is said to exist ‘‘far 
up the slopes of Haleakala” on Maui, and there are several on Kauai. 
Brigham knew of no quarries on Oahu, and it is possible that the 
specimen figured is from one of those on Hawaii, as all the stone of 
these two quarries is said to be dark-colored and very compact. A 
thin section of my adze shows that it is a fine-grained olivine-free 
basalt, composed almost wholly of numerous very small, short, and 
uniformly shaped tablets of labradorite (about Ab,An.) with 
very small irregular grains of slightly brownish augite. There are 
a few grains of quartz but no olivine, magnetite, or glass. This 
basalt, in its great denseness, freedom from phenocrysts and vesicles, 
and its microtexture and simplicity of mineral composition, differs 
from any of the basalts of Hawaii® or Oahu that I have studied. 
No chemical analysis of it has yet been made. 
The adze figured here is of Brigham’s type “‘with divergent sides 
and angular tang,” and it closely resembles No. 3155 (Fig. 78 and 
Plate 55) of the Bishop Museum, which was also found on eastern 
Oahu. It is 21 cm. long, 8 cm. wide at the cutting edge, and about 
5 em. thick, except at the tang which is only 3 to 3.5 cm. thick. The 
angle of the cutting edge in my specimen is sharp and is about 60°. 
This angle seems to be about the average, although the angles shown 
by Brigham in his Fig. 74 vary considerably, as he states from 34° 
to 78°. The slightly curved upper surface and the much more con- 
vexly curved under surface of the distal cutting portion are well 
smoothed by grinding but are not polished; whereas the sides are 
chipped flat and only slightly smooth. The tang, both above and 
below, is roughly finished by chipping and has sharp edges. These 
Hawaiian adzes seem generally to have been attached to a wooden 
handle, as shown by Brigham in his Plate 60, but he is not very clear 
on this point. 
The general resemblance in form between the Egyptian and the 
Hawaiian adze is seen in the collocated views of the two given in 
the accompanying illustrations, Figs. 1 and 4, the side views, showing 
the resemblance especially well. The unfinished Hawaiian adzes, 
such as Nos. 8, 18, and 19 on Brigham’s Plate 58, on which the faces 
are not smoothed, are even more strikingly like the Egyptian. The 
slightly curved upper surfaces, the cutting edge of about the same 
6 Wasninaton, H. §., Petrology of the Hawaiian Islands, several papers in Amer. 
Journ. Sei., vols. 5 and 6, 1923. It resembles most several from Mauna Kea, on Hawaii. 
