

traveller Townsend, who, after crossing the Rocky Mountains, made more than one visit 

 to the Sandwich Islands. 



Additional examples have since occasionally found their way to Europe or America. 

 The Liverpool Museum contains two specimens, a male and female, obtained by the 

 late Mr. J. Heywood ; and the Hepburn collection, presented in 1870 to the Museum of 

 the University of Cambridge, included another : but the distinction between the 

 different members of the genus having been made sufficiently clear, there is no necessity 

 for further details. 



This is, perhaps, the best known species both to natives and denizens of the 

 Sandwich Islands ; for it was principally from the yellow feathers that grow beneath its 

 wings, together with the still more beautiful and similarly coloured upper tail-coverts of 

 the now extinct Drepanis pacifica, that the state robes of the princes * were fabricated. 

 It was the privilege of those classes alone to wear them ; nor can it be denied that they 

 formed a becoming and magnificent garb, as beautiful as anything that the triumphs of 

 civilized art can now produce. The fine statue of Kamehameha I., which stands in 

 front of the Government House in Honolulu, represents the great conqueror who first 

 consolidated his sovereignty over the various islands, draped in his Mamo, as this 

 feather cloak is called in the Hawaiian language, the texture of which is wonderfully 

 represented by the sculptor's chisel. Gazing on this and recalling the fact that the 

 princes of Hawaii-Nei were a race of giants, most of them being over six feet in height, 

 we can well understand what an imposing effect must have been produced. The great 

 yellow war-cloak of Kamehameha I. had been gradually growing in size through the 

 reigns of eight preceding monarchs. The groundwork is of coarse netting, to which, 

 with skill now impossible to emulate, are attached the delicate feathers, those on the 

 border being reversed : the length is four feet, while there is a spread of eleven feet 

 and a half at the bottom, the whole having the appearance of a mantle of gold. The 

 cloaks and capes which I examined in Honolulu were all of the lighter shade of 

 yellow, which belongs to the feathers of the present species ; but on carefully going 

 through those in the Ethnological Collection of the British Museum, I find that in 

 most of the robes made of the wing-tufts of Acrulocercus the more beautiful plumage 

 of Drepanis pacifica is introduced, though in small quantities only. The ancient 

 kings had a regular staff of bird-catchers, who were very expert in their vocation, and 

 made use of the sticky juice of the bread-fruit (called in Hawaiian " Pilali "), or of the 

 tenacious gum of the fragrant olapa (Cheirodendron gaudichaudii), smearing it over the 

 branches of a ohia tree, and often fastening there an example of the scarlet Iiwi 

 (Vestiaria coccinea), of which more in another place, as an additional attraction to 

 the Eoyal bird, well known for his pugnacity, who, in his eagerness to attack his 



1 It appears from the following extract from the Hon. E. M. Dagget's able Introduction to ' The Legends 

 and Myths of Hawaii ' by his Hawaiian Majesty Kalakaua (p. 32), that in olden times certain classes were 

 privileged to wear robes made of feathers of certain colours : — " Yellow was the ' tabu ' colour of royalty, 

 and red that of the priesthood, and mantles of feathers of the Oo and Mamo could be worn only by kings and 

 princes. Feather capes of mingled red and yellow distinguished the lesser nobility." 



