CHAPTER III. 
DIMENSIONS AND STRUCTURAL DETAILS. 
We think in terms of feet and inches; some of us have acquired the 
greater decimal facility of the meter and its parts; but we postulate in 
all the acts of our life a standard of measurement which we regard as 
absolute; at least it is fixed for all of our practical purposes. But in 
these studies of the artifacts of Nuclear Polynesia we are to find a 
tangle of problems in establishing the units of measurement. We may 
be sure that there is a certain general agreement of measurement; to 
those of us who have shared the life of these primitives in culture there 
may be a certain rough and ready familiarity with the principles of 
metrology which obtain among folk to whom the inch and the foot and 
the yard and the fathom yet function in the personal measurement, and 
at the same time there is no definite standard preserved, as at Green- 
wich or at Washington, but every man is a standard unto himself. 
The method which we find it incumbent to pursue in dissecting out 
from the dimensions of these many clubs the system of measurement 
employed by the clubwrights may be arid in its earlier stages; mere col- 
umns of figures are somewhat wearisome, yet we can not proceed in 
safety to the derivation of any conclusion until the data are properly 
ordered for examination. We shall begin, therefore, with that first 
dimension which appears almost absolute—the length of the pieces. 
It is, of course, not quite accurate to speak of this dimension as abso- 
lute; it is really conditioned by the purpose of the weapon; the missile 
clubs and certain of the maces are normally short, and several of the 
larger types are reproduced in smaller form for single-handed use. Yet 
within the limits of convenience of their deadly purpose this dimension 
of the clubs is fairly enough to be described as absolute; it establishes 
the basic measurement, and the other dimensions of width of blade and 
the like are functions thereof still more remotely differenced by consid- 
erations of grace in the art sense and of weight in the practical sense 
of utility, the latter functions being largely out of our investigation. 
An element of uncertainty engages with this prime dimension of length 
over all; our comparison would be far more accurate if we could estab- 
lish it upon a base of effective length, that is to say, upon the length 
from the end of the shaft to the point which strikes the object. This 
we are not able to determine, for there is great variety. For the billets 
we may properly assume that effective length equates with length over 
all. Because of a specific trick of fence the same holds true of the 
pandanus club, yet that dimension must be measured as approximately 
the chord of an irregular arc. In the rootstock clubs it is apparent that 
effective length is less than total length, yet the difference is not imme- 
diately apparent and is not to be measured. In the lipped clubs we 
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