180 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES® 
of sugar-cane, and accompanying their recitation 
with attitudes and gestures expressive of the most 
frantic grief. When they had finished, they sat 
down, and mingled with the thronging multitudes 
in their loud and ceaseless wailing. 
Though these ceremonies were so popular, and 
almost universal, on the decease of their chiefs, 
they do not appear to have been practised by the 
common people among themselves. The wife did 
not knock out her teeth on the death of her husband, 
nor the son his, when he lost his father or mother; 
neither did parents thus express their grief when 
bereaved of an only child. Sometimes they cut 
their hair, but in general only indulged in lamen¬ 
tations and weeping for several days. 
Anxious to make ourselves acquainted with 
their reasons for these practices, we have fre¬ 
quently conversed with the natives respecting 
them. The former, such as polling the hair, 
knocking out the teeth, tatauing the tongue, &c. 
they say is designed to shew the loss they have 
sustained, and perpetually to remind them of their 
departed friends. Kamehamaru, queen of Riho- 
riho, who died on her recent visit to England, 
gave me a fine answer to this effect, on the death 
of Keopuolani, her husband’s mother. A few 
days after the interment, I went into a house 
where a number of chiefs were assembled, for the 
purpose of having their tongues tataued ; and the 
artist was performing this operation on her’s when 
I entered. He first immersed the face of the 
instrument, which was a quarter of an inch wide, 
and set with a number of small fish-bones, into 
the colouring matter, placed it on her tongue, and, 
giving it a quick and smart stroke with a small 
rod in his right hand, punctured the skin, and 
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