CHAPTER V. 



HAWAIIAN ORNAMENTAI. DESIGN. 



We have at some length studied the material and its manufadlure into kapa, 

 and also the implements and coloring matter used in its decoration both in form and 

 color, and we have in this volume ample illustration of the results obtained, and with 

 these we are able in some degree to compare the Hawaiian work with that of other 

 Pacific islanders ; it now remains to examine cursorily the nature of the designs used 

 by the old Hawaiians, of whose work we have the fullest series, and where it differs 

 from the others to at least note the fact; we have not specimens enough of all the 

 other groups to do mi:ch more. I have already in the introductory lines of this treatise 

 disclaimed all exact knowledge of the art of ornamentation, and any intention of 

 doing more than diredling the attention of ni}' reader to the varieties of line and figure 

 found in the old Hawaiian kapa; of the beauty of coloration the plates themselves 

 will be the clearest expositor. 



Professor A. C. Haddon of Cambridge has full}^ treated one branch of the 

 subject,'*' but the explanatory description of the ornamentation of Poljmesia has yet to 

 be written, indeed has yet to be studied. When I began this series of treatises on 

 Hawaiian Antiquities in 1897 it was generally believed that the old Hawaiians had 

 left no pidlorial records, for their kapa showed none, both human and animal forms 

 seemed wholly absent from that class of applied ornament except as echini were some- 

 times used as a stamp, but hardly as a pictorial representation, even vegetable forms 

 are rare as already noted ; but within the past dozen years discoveries have been made 

 in caves and on ledges generally submerged by the tides or covered with deposits of 

 sand which storms occasionally remove for a sort time, by A. F. Judd Esq., Mr. J. C. 

 Farley of Kauai, and Mr. J. F. G. Stokes, Curator of Poljmesian Ethnology in this 

 Museum, and some others, of most curious delineations of human and animal forms, 

 some of them apparently ancient, and all very primitive in style. These are cut into 

 the rock (a more or less cellular basalt), and are now being studied by Mr. Stokes, 

 and his results will in due course be published,'" so that I merely call attention here to 

 their existence in face of the fact that they have never appeared on kapa so far as 

 known. Hawaiian bas-reliefs and full figures of persons as well as of the gods have 

 long been familiar and are sufiEcient in number and quality to compare favorably with 

 the carving of the Maori at the extreme southwest of the Polynesian region. From 



"The Decorative Art of British New Guinea : a study in Papuan Ethnography. Dublin, 1894. 

 '"Occasional Papers, IV, 4: a portion of the study. (203) 



