MIGRATION DRIFT AND ERRATICS. 167 
This piece (Plate VII) is a very beautiful mask of the type usual in 
New Ireland adjacent to the shores of St. George’s Channel, and it 
comes into the collection with the record that it was collected in New 
Ireland. The type is both highly developed and very narrowly 
restricted. Such masks are found only in the eastern region of the 
Bismarck Archipelago, on the shores of the channel which parts the 
two great islands; even when they are found in New Britain on the 
western shore of the channel the evidence is uniformly discoverable 
that New Ireland is the place of manufacture. The masks and mask- 
oids of New Ireland are all carved of a soft and readily workable wood; 
they are all covered with such brilliant pigments as were originally or 
have more recently become available to the savage artist. Of such 
sort is this mask, but with a significant difference. Quite in the New 
Ireland style, the human head of this mask is surmounted by a carved 
bird, its long beak reaching down to the brow of the man face, its wings 
extending downward along the cheeks of the head below, its tail 
short and pertly cocked. While this mask was still in New Ireland, 
which it seems never to have left until it passed into the hands of the 
collector who sent it along to London to be disposed of by Oldman, it 
was subjected to an added treatment in decoration. Upon the wooden 
breast of the bird was set a bird skin with its feathers well preserved. 
Naturally this placing brought the feathered tail downward from the 
wooden breast in close parallelism with the carved beak. Upon the 
summit of the head of the wooden bird is pinned the dried head of a 
real bird, and this head faces toward the rear, as if continuing the posi- 
tioning of the skin which had been applied upon the breast below. 
From the perked-up wooden tail depends a second tail of stuff rolled 
into a cord as great as the finger and more than 2 feet in length. It 
begins and it ends in a bunch of bird skins, and upon much of its length 
are applied the bright-hued skins of various Meliphagide, an Australa- 
sian order closely akin to the Trochilidze, which embraces the scarcely 
more gemlike humming-birds of the American continents. 
Feathers are but scantily employed in the decorative art of New 
Ireland; the employment of the whole bird-skin is wholly foreign to 
this culture group; neither observation nor the written record afford 
evidence that the men of New Ireland know how to skin a bird for the 
preservation of the beauty of the plumage. This decoration charac- 
terizes the art of New Guinea and is widely spread through all the com- 
munities of Torres Straits and of the northern coast of theisland. This 
piece, then, carries its own evidence that it was made in New Ireland 
and that in New Ireland it was enriched by some exile from New Guinea. 
These three erratics establish links between Fiji and Ysobel, between 
Fiji and New Guinea, between New Guinea and New Ireland. Now, 
between the points of these pairs there is in savage life no more chance 
of normal intercommunication than there is between Bering Sea and 
