INTRODUCTION 



sepulchres, while the coast burials are more recent. The specimens herewith 

 studied appear to have come from one or the other of these localities. It 

 must be acknowledged that the account of W. Ellis' of a depository of the 

 dead is of separate value. A house is described by him built of fragments of 

 lava, laid up evenly on the outside, generally about eighty feet long, from four 

 to six broad, and about four feet high. Some were apparently ancient, others 

 evidently had been standing but a few years. The bodies of the priests were 

 buried within the precincts of the temple, while those of the common people — 

 though in some instances placed in caves and subterranean caverns — were, as 

 a rule, buried in small pits near houses or in the sand. The number of the 

 priests is necessarily small and can be here excluded. I am of the opinion 

 that the statements here made do not invalidate the conclusion that the 

 material forming the basis of this paper represents two classes of crania, 

 which are separated into a high and a low class group. 



The difference noted in mortuary customs harmonizes with certain con- 

 trasts in physical proportions between the upper and lower caste. The 

 nobility were of large stature. They had more abundant food than the lower 

 caste; indeed, were great gluttons. Dr. Chapin* describes them, as late as 

 1837, as eating three or four heavy meals of flesh and poi daily and becoming 

 excessively corpulent. Diseases local to the alimentary canal and lungs were 

 common. The people were subject to apoplexy and asthma, and a mild form 

 of rheumatism attacked both classes. Nothing was known of the systemic 

 diseases with which Europeans are afflicted, such as measles, typhus fever, 

 typhoid fever, scarlet fever, whooping-cough, mumps, and syphilis. Malarial 

 diseases and leprosy were also unheard of 



But both classes had much in common. The supply of food in pre- 

 European times was monotonous. With the exception of a few fruits and an 

 occasional fish, hog, or fowl, the islanders subsisted on poi, a farinaceous dish 

 prepared from the taro [Colocasia antiquoriuii). 



In 1893 a collection of skulls was made by Dr. Whitney, under circum- 

 stances which make it certain that they are all of the noble class. In the 

 same year Professor Benjamin Sharp, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, 

 and Professor William Libbey, of Princeton University, made a collection at 

 Kipakai, on the island of Kauwai, which are as certainly of the lower class. 

 The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia possesses a miscellaneous 

 series of Hawaiian skulls which have been collected from superficial graves, 

 and most of them of recent origin. All the specimens above named, si.xty-five 



