ural hair of the tail, and are brown-coloured. They are suspended
by strings passing round the crown of the head or from the plaits at
the sides of the head. They are generally only about 6 inches long;
but sometimes the ornaments into which they are made are much longer,
and I have seen them worn by women hanging down as far as the level
of the breast. These pigtails are sometimes worn hanging in clusters
of several tails. They are also often, in the case of women, decorated
with shells, beads, dogs' teeth, etc., which are attached like tassels
to their upper ends. [44]

Plate 30, Fig. 3 shows a pigtail ornament for hanging over the head,
with the tails suspended on both sides and strings of beads and dogs'
teeth hanging from the upper ends of the tails. The ornament is worn
by the middle man in Plate 9 and by the little girl figured in Plates
22 and 23, and it is seen more extensively worn by women decorated
for dancing in the frontispiece and in Plate 17, and by the girl in
Plate 71.

A peculiar and less usual sort of head ornament (Plate 30, Fig. 4),
worn by both men and women, is a cluster of about a dozen or less of
bark cloth strings, about 1 1/2 feet long, fastened together at the
top, and there suspended by a string tied round the top of the head,
so as to hang down like the lashes of a several-thonged whip over the
back. The individual strings of the cluster are quite thin, but they
are decorated with the yellow and brown straw-like material above
referred to in connection with abdominal belt No. 6 (being prepared
from the same plant, apparently Dendrobium, and in the same way),
the material being twisted in a close spiral round the strings, and
making them look, when seen from a short distance off, like strings
of very small yellow and brown beads, irregularly arranged in varying
lengths of the two colours, shading off gradually from one to the
other. Even when so bound round, these strings are only about 1/16
to 1/8 of an inch thick.

The Mafulu comb (Plate 30, Fig. 2) differs in construction from
the wooden combs, all made in one piece, which are commonly used in
Mekeo. It is made of four, five, or six thin pieces of wood, which are
left blunt at one end, but are sharpened to points at the other. These
are bound together with straw-like work, sometimes beautifully done,
the binding being nearly always near to the blunt ends, though it
is sometimes almost in the middle. [45] The combs so made are flat,
w