OCCASIONAL NOTES. 
4 
A PAPUAN KITE. 
The late Lieutenant Governor of British New Guinea, Sir William 
Macgregor, enhancing, as usual with him, the value of his Annual 
Report to the Queensland Government for the year 1897-8 by record- 
ing in it much that is of scientific interest, teaches us, among other 
things ethnological, the construction and purpose of a kite which he 
found in use at Dobu, one of the islands of the d'Entreeasteaux group 
on the east coast. Had these Reports the circulation which, in the 
interest of ethnology and geography, should by all means be given to 
them, it would be simply an impertinence in anyone to reproduce 
their author's information on this or any subject, but, unfortunately, 
they are but little known outside the pale of officialdom. It there- 
fore occurs to the writer that since he has it in his power to make this 
odd bit of untutored cunning more widely known by distributing, with 
a few explanatory remarks, a surplus store of the drawings of it which 
were prepared under his direction for the Report aforesaid, it is almost 
imperative upon him to take the first opportunity of doing so. 
It appears that the voyager among these islands may occasionally 
see, and not without surprise, a number of canoes dotting the sea, each 
tenanted by a single native who is apparently intent upon the amuse- 
ment of flying a little kite over the surface of the water. If his first 
thought should be the very natural one that he has here met with an 
instance of the use of one of the toys of his youth among grown-up 
savages, illustrating the doctrine that the uncivilised adult remains 
mentally very much on the level of civilised childhood, he will, to his 
further astonishment, find on inquiry that the Papuan is not as a 
child flying his kite for amusement, but for the very practical purpose 
of catching fish. How he manages to catch fish by means of a kite 
is open to explanation ; by what course of " applied science" he was 
led to find that he could do so is a piece of knowledge which, perhaps, 
has slipped irrevocably behind the veil of oblivion. We might be 
content to say that it is done by means of a piece of cobweb attached 
to the tail of the kite, but the structure of the whole apparatus is of 
sufficient interest to warrant a fuller description of its parts. 
All the kites referred to in Sir W. Macgregor's Report are 
approximately of the form depicted on Plate 1, and of the size 
indicated by the scale beside the figure. Each is composed of three 
large flat leaves of a tree which the Colonial Botanist, Mr. Bailey, is 
disposed to identify with Morinda citrifolia. Its basal and narrower 
portion consists of a single leaf placed stalk downwards, truncated at 
the apex, and here overlapped by the apical end of a second leaf, which 
is in its turn truncated at the base in order to form part of the upper 
