of the statues were made. Mr. Balfour supposes that the sculptors chose for this purpose a vesicular red tufa in order to imitate bleached Melanesian hair. Let us inquire whether Polynesian culture may not provide a more probable motive for the choice of this material.
I have not hitherto mentioned the well-known head-dresses of Polynesia. Those of the Hawaiian Islands are especially familiar objects in museums, though so far as I am aware no example is known with the cylindrical form of the crowns of Easter Island. I have not so far brought them into the argument because we have no evidence of their connection with the dead, which forms so definite a link between the statues of Easter Island and the hats and images of the ghost-societies of Melanesia.
The close resemblance in form between some of the head-coverings of the Hawaiian Islands and the hats of the Banks Islands, however, suggests that they have a common origin, and it therefore becomes significant that the head-coverings of the Hawaiian Islands are made of red or orange feathers, while red feathers are also used in the head-dresses of Samoa.[1] If we are to seek a special motive for the choice of red vesicular tufa, I should prefer to look to the red feathers of the head-dresses of other parts of Polynesia rather than to the artificial orange-yellow colour produced by bleaching the hair in New Guinea, in certain parts of Melanesia, and more rarely in Polynesia.
Although I believe that the evidence points strongly to hats rather than hair as the prototype of the crowns of the statues of Easter Island, the possibility that there may be some relation between them and hair cannot be excluded. But this relation is almost certainly of a kind very different from that assumed by Mr. Balfour and Sir Everard im Thurn. It is generally assumed that cutting the hair into fanciful shapes and changing its colour by various dyes, which are practised in several parts of Oceania, have
