DEGENER: LEAVING HAWAII 75 



neighboring forehills. A strip of barren beach would give the enemy less aid 

 in sighting their targets. 



A few days were spent by the speaker and his companions digging a 

 large hole in the .sand under a clump of towering casuarinas. With the aid of 

 an old piano box and many sand-filled burlap bags it formed a tolerable 

 air-raid shelter. The soldiers began digging their very elaborate burrows at 

 about the same ,time, unearthing in the neighboring lot a human skeleton. 

 It was in a remarkable state of preservation due, no doubt, to the sea sand, 

 in which the corpse had been interred, consisting of almost 100% bone — 

 "bone" of coral, mollusk, echinoderm, fish and coralline algae. The man had 

 died after the death of a loved one or of his chief as the absence of his two 

 upper front teeth proved. In case of mourning, the Hawaiian formerly 

 inserted a wedge between his two front teeth, gave it a sharp blow with a 

 stone ; knocked the wedge in twice toward the gum on the other side of both 

 teeth and then extracted the loosened incisors as a token of grief. 



In the beach house were almost twenty years' accumulation of Hawaiian 

 herbarium specimens, the Philippine and Bornean collection of ferns pur- 

 chased and received by bequest from the late D. LeRoy Topping, and much 

 of the Anne Archbold — "Cheng Ho" collection of Fiji specimens including 

 a new family or two. These plants to the speaker were almost as precious 

 as life itself ; to many others, far more precious. They had to be rescued 

 from possible destruction. 



The islands had been hard hit, harder than we liked to confess. Trans- 

 portation to Honolulu and storage, for unappreciated dry plants when food 

 and munitions needed transfer and housing, were not available. Days were 

 spent removing excess newspaper from between duplicate herbarium speci- 

 mens, packing the entire collection, and mailing it by insured parcel post to 

 The New York Botanical Garden. Days were spent in interring in caves or 

 other secret places family heirlooms, silverware, botanical source books like 

 "Engler-Prantl" and the Index Kewensis, compound microscope, and other 

 material too valuable to abandon to the enemy or to leave unprotected in a 

 vacated house. As the gravid ceiling proved, the attic had been groaning 

 for several years with unsold copies of Books 3 and 4 of the speaker's ''Flora 

 Hazvaiiensis" or "New Illustrated Flora of the Hawaiian Islands." Con- 

 sidering the emergency it was judged wisest to evacuate all but about 250 

 copies of each of these two Books. The speaker therefore wrote to the main 

 library in Honolulu for the loan of a library directory. As none was forth- 

 coming, he consulted an old gazetteer listing all communities in the United 

 States. Then the wrapping of Floras began in earnest, one book per package. 



Quite safe in assuming that a community with a population of 5,000 or 

 over boasted some kind of library, the speaker mailed one book to the public 

 library of the first community of proper size listed in the gazetteer ; he 



