Hawaiian Scrapers. 



75 



We honor inventors of new and useful tools or processes, and perhaps the 

 Polynesian women appreciated those who made better tools for their kapa-making. 

 Such improvements spread slowly, if at all, among the tribes, and we find a ver}' few 

 adopted over a wide range of territorj' ; evidentlj^ the tool was thus far advanced before 

 the dispersal of the tribes, if found far from home. There are none of the Pacific 

 groups that have not some peculiar modification of a tool, and no one of the kapa- 

 making groups whose arsenal was so full or so well developed as the Hawaiian, and 

 for this reason it has been chosen as the norm with which all others mav be compared. 

 Taking up the tools in the order of their use, we shall find the earlier ones needed in 

 the process, such as cutters for the twigs, or scrapers for the outer bark, show least 



Pig. 30. HAWAIIAN SHELI. AND BONE SCRAPERS. 



variation throughout the kapa-making world. The stone adzes used for cutting the 

 twigs were, it is true, used for so many more important works that their development 

 had little to do with the present industry and they may be set aside. ^^ The cutter to 

 split the tube of bark longitudinally was almost universall}' a shell, for which man}- 

 bivalves were adapted, and a shell it was (although usuall}^ of a thicker and firmer 

 substance) that served as scraper to remove the outer bark from the fibrous portion 

 before the beating began. In the Pacific the form varied little, and the Meleagrina was 

 the favorite shell, although the Fijians used the Triton. On the Hawaiian group the 

 tough bone of the carapace plates of the sea-turtle {Che Ionia vii'gata^ was used iu 

 common with the other, and it was more abundant, tougher and more easily worked ; 

 both are shown iu the illustration. Fig. 30. As sea shells of the kinds used have out- 

 lines more or less curved, the first improvement was to grind an edge flat; then came 



^"This tool has been fully described in a former Memoir of this Museum ou Hawaiian Stone Implements. 



