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STRAY NOTES ON PAPUAN ETHNOLOGY, 
In July, 1890, I was visiting the Village of Polatona, in 
Bentley Bay, near the eastern extremity of New Guinea. Outside 
the travellers' house where I lodged, there was planted in the 
sand of the beach a post about six feet high, carved and painted 
in red, white and black. It so attracted my attention that I 
made on the spot a pencil sketch, re-drawn on Plate lviii. My 
enquiries elicited that it was a canoe stem or figure-head, yeroma, 
and that it had once belonged to one of the Chads Bay natives, 
hanged for the murder of Capt. Ansell.* It had probably formed 
a portion of one of the large native sailing vessels, whose hulls 
are built of several enormous planks sewn together. 
An artistically executed bird's head surmounted the pillar. 
My colleague Mr. North, Ornithologist to the Australian Museum, 
kindly examined the original drawing, and in discussing it gave 
me the benefit of his expert knowledge. We agree that the ball 
placed under the beak and the buttress behind the neck are to 
be regarded as decorations additional to the original scheme; that 
the graceful and boldly modelled neck, the general shape of the 
head, and especially the crest, identify the bird as a kind of 
cassowary; further, that the line down the neck is an allusion to 
the brightly coloured space bare of feathers so conspicuous on 
that bird. 
It was not to be expected of the savage artist that his work 
should afford exact specific recognition of the cassowary he 
portrayed. The only species recorded from this locality, Casua- 
rius picticollis, Sclater, differs markedly by its flattened crest, 
and no known species, so Mr. North says, has a beak so pro- 
nouncedly decurved. But it is possible that a bird still unknown 
to science was copied by the Papuan craftsman. 
The bird's neck issues from the gaping and toothed jaws of the 
conventionalised crocodile, the angle of whose mouth is carried 
up in a scroll to form a large eye. In Prof. Haddon's illustrations 
the usual attitude of the bird seems vertical to the plane of the 
crocodile; here, on the contrary, it is horizontal. Below, the post 
* Thomson; British New Guinea, p. 34. 
