POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
525 
the nation considered the lowest degradation, by being 
converted into chisels or borers, for the builders of 
canoes and houses, or transformed into fishing-hooks. 
In order to avoid this, they carried the bones of their 
chiefs, and even the recently deceased corpse, and depo¬ 
sited them in the caverns of some of the most inaccessi¬ 
ble rocks in the lofty and fearful precipices of the moun¬ 
tain defiles. 
Notwithstanding the labour and care bestowed on the 
bodies of the dead, they did not last very long; proba¬ 
bly the most carefully preserved could not be kept more 
than twelve months. When they began to decay, the 
bones, &c, were buried, but the skull was preserved in the 
family sometimes for several generations, wrapt carefully 
in native cloth, and often suspended from some part of 
the roof of their habitations. In some of the islands they 
dried the bodies, and, wrapping them in numerous folds 
of cloth, suspended them also from the roofs of their 
dwelling houses. 
The tribes inhabiting the islands of the Pacific 
were remarkably superstitious, and among them none 
more so than the inhabitants of the Georgian and Society 
Islands. They imagined they lived in a world of spirits, 
which surrounded them night and day, watching every 
action of their lives, and ready to avenge the slightest 
neglect, or the least disobedience to their injunctions, as 
proclaimed by their priests. 
These dreaded beings were seldom thought to resort 
to the habitations of men on errands of benevolence. 
They were supposed to haunt the places of their former 
abode, to arouse the survivors from their slumbers by 
making a squeaking noise, which when the natives heard 
they would sometimes reply to, asking what they were. 
