General Conclusions. 65 



suitable. The preparation of "made dishes" was an art practised 

 by all Polj^nesians, and the artificial preservation of food was well 

 understood in Micronesia and elsewhere. 



Then the medicine of these peoples does not exist in any 

 museum, with the exception of one or two surgical appliances from 

 the Hawaiian Islands in the Dr. Arning colledlion at Berlin. It is 

 war, war, war all the time: clubs, swords, spears, arrows, slings 

 and shields form the vast majority of specimens in all museums, 

 and yet these war-like people did not fight all the time. Certainly 

 the Polynesians were a race fond of sports and had many games, 

 but with the exception of the dancing appliances there is hardly a 

 hint of these in museums, except at Berlin. In no museum was 

 any attempt made to illustrate the manufacfture of kapa or bark- 

 cloth the universal Polynesian clothing, so far as anj^ was necessary. 

 It is true that in most of them kapa beaters and stamps as well as 

 the finished material are found, but they are never brought together, 

 and a visitor or even a student would be puzzled to make out the 

 connedtion between the disjefla membra of the complicated process. 



Idols abound, but they are not distinguished from mere irn- 

 ages like those from Rapanui (Easter Island) which are not objecT:s 

 of worship, or those from New Guinea w^hich are Penates. Every- 

 where they are simple curiosities. The missionaries to the Pacific 

 did not, like those who invaded Mexico, destroy everything that 

 had what they considered the Devil's mark, but they sent home to 

 London and to Boston specimens with more or less explanation, 

 and it is not on them but on the museums that the blame must 

 rest if this information is often lost with the labels. The London 

 collecftion has greatly enriched the British Museum, and the one 

 gathered in the Boston Cabinet has come to the Bishop Museum. 

 In the latter place it is intended soon to show the modes of worship 

 and the place of some of the "forty thousand and four hundred 

 thousand gods". Much is know^n of the Pacific theogonj- but no 

 museum has imparted this knowledge; it has come from Turner, 

 Gill, Codrington and other missionaries. 



O.P.— B.P.B.M. F. 



