rows of wooden posts, and there being no outer walls and
no partitions, the wind blew freely through them. The floor was covered
with mats, forming a single cushion, on which the people sat by day and
slept at night. In some houses there was a single stool appropriated to
the use of the master of the family; otherwise an ordinary dwelling
contained little or no furniture except a few small blocks of wood,
hollowed out on the upper surface so as to form head-rests or pillows.
The houses served chiefly as dormitories and as shelters in rain: the
people took their meals in the open air. Chiefs, however, often owned
houses of much larger dimensions, which were built and maintained for
them at the common expense of the district. Some of these chiefly
dwellings were two hundred feet long, thirty feet broad, and twenty feet
high under the ridge; one of them, belonging to the king, measured three
hundred and seventy feet in length. We read of houses which could
contain two or three thousand people;[6] and of one particular house in
Tahiti we are informed that it was no less than three hundred and
ninety-seven feet long by forty-eight feet broad, and that the roof was
supported in the middle by twenty wooden pillars, each twenty-one feet
high, while the sides or eaves of the roof rested on one hundred and
twenty-four pillars, each ten feet high. A wooden wall or fence enclosed
the whole. This great house was used for the celebration of feasts,
which sometimes lasted for days together, and at which nearly all the
hogs in the island were consumed.[7]

[6] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 181 _sqq._; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp.
341 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 170 _sqq._; J. A. Moerenhout,
_op. cit._ ii. 84 _sqq._ As to the wooden head-rests see W.
Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 188 _sq._

[7] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 213 _sq._

Like all the Polynesians down to the date of their discovery by
Europeans, the inhabitants of the Society Islands were totally ignorant
of the use and even of the existence of the metals, and they had to
employ substitutes, chiefly stone and bone, for the manufacture of their
tools and weapons. Of their tools Captain Cook gives the following
account: "They have an adze of stone; a chisel, or gouge, of bone,
generally that of a man's arm between the wrist and elbow; a rasp of
coral; and the skin of a sting-ray, with coral sand, as a filer or
polisher. This is a complete catalogue of their tools, and with