LIFE IN THE SOLOMON ISLANDS. 485 



group is the beauty of shape and decoration of the canoes. These 

 vary in size from the tiny thing just able to support a boy of 

 twelve, to the great head-hunting canoes, capable of carrying fifty 

 or sixty men. They are built of planks laboriously adzed down 

 from the solid tree, and are sewn together with a tough vegetable 

 fiber, the seams being calked with a sort of putty scraped from 

 the kernel of a nut (Parinarium laurinum) that grows plentifully 

 in the bush. This vegetable putty sets perfectly hard in a few 

 hours and is quite water-tight. The canoes are ornamented ex- 

 teriorly at bow and stern with white cowry shells and inlaid with 

 pieces of pearl-shell cut into patterns, and at the bow end, just 

 above the water-line, is often a small human-shaped figure-head. 

 These canoes are propelled solely by paddles, being unadapted to 

 sailing, and, being long, narrow, and light for their size, they travel 

 at a great rate. 



Except perhaps on Bougainville, the use of stone implements 

 has gone out among these natives, but while at Guadalcanar I ob- 

 tained more than two hundred stone adzes. These were brought 

 me by the natives, and were for the most part dug up by boys 

 upon the sites of old houses. I asked an old man to mount me 

 one upon a wooden handle in the correct way. The same form of 

 handle is still used, but a plane-iron is now employed instead of 

 the stone axe. With these they cut out their canoe-planks and 

 fashion the wooden bowls in which they serve their food. 



The houses vary in shape somewhat in different parts of the 

 group, and in Florida and Fauro houses built on posts may be 

 seen. On Guadalcanar the eaves of the roof come right down to 

 the ground. The material is always the same, the leaf of the sago 

 palm, which makes a durable and dry roof. There is no floor but 

 the bare ground, but rough couches are made of palm-stems laid 

 side by side, and raised from a few inches to a couple of feet from 

 the ground. They are most uncomfortable to sleep upon, being 

 very hard and rough and invariably too short. A fireplace is 

 made in the center of the house, and the smoke finds its way 

 out through the door, or through the roof or sides of the house. 

 Strings of pigs' jaw-bones, cuscus and flying-fox skulls, fishes' 

 bones, turtles' heads, and sometimes human jaw-bones may be 

 seen strung on strings along the rafters as mementoes of former 

 feasts ; but the human heads, at least in the head-hunting districts, 

 are reserved for the canoe-houses. These are larger and better 

 built than the ordinary dwelling-houses, and are tambu (tabooed) 

 for women — i. e., a woman is not allowed to enter them, or indeed 

 to pass in front of them. 



Both men and women take their parts in the gardens ; felling 

 the trees and fencing against wild pigs being men's work, while 

 the actual gardening — planting, weeding, and digging — is done by 



VOL. XXXV. — 31 



