242 FUNAFUTI ATOLL. 



Another ornate tukai was decorated with less elaboration than 

 the one described. In place of the discs of Foraminifera, white 

 feathers were used. 



A third tukai, intended perhaps for every-day wear, was of the 

 same dimensions but quite plain. 



THE TITI. 



The " titi " or woman's dress appears in Funafuti in a form 

 common alike to Melanesians and Polynesians, and extending 

 over a wide area of the South Pacific. The name of it suggests a 

 derivation from the Ti tree (Cordyline) whose handsome, elliptical 

 leaves tied by their stalks in a belt are in some islands still used 

 as a temporary or hastily made dress, and which may have been 

 the earliest form of the garment.* 



In making the titi, a woman arranges her material, usually 

 dressed leaves of pandanus or coconut palm, in convenient heaps. 

 For the waist-band is selected a double cord of two or three ply 

 coconut fibre, one end of which is made fast to a post of the hut 

 the other being attached to the operator's waist. Sitting on the 

 floor, the workwoman draws from the heap two handfuls of fibre, 

 one she doubles over the cords, the other she knots across and 



Fig. 6. Fig. 7. Fig. 8. 



between them, as shown diagrammatically by fig. 6. A continua- 

 tion of this process (fig. 7) completes the dress, f The leaves 

 may afterwards be combed into finer strands by the " tosi." At 

 one end the waist-band terminates in a loop, at the other in two 

 strings with which it is tied at the side of the wearer. 



Ornamental dance dresses differ from ordinary ones by the 

 addition of extra flounces, etc. A specimen of the former 

 now before me (fig. 8) weighs four pounds six ounces and 

 measures three feet in length and twenty-one inches in depth. 



* Guppy loc. cit., p. 130; and Turner loc. cit., p. 118. 



t Elsewhere in the Pacific other modes of knotting the fibres to the 

 belt exist. That none of these have been described is a surprising 

 instance of the superficialness of our knowledge of Polynesian Ethnology. 

 Here lies a field for cultivation at once easy and prolific. A Papuan 

 pattern, very distinct from that described in the text, will shortly be 

 described in the Proc. Linn. Soc. N.S. Wales for 1897. 



