he picked the plants, stripped them of the bark, and with his own olden tools manufactured the sample of fiber.

My object was to ascertain what kind of plants he selects, and to see the primitive method of manufacture, with the idea that this method might furnish some suggestions for the construction of the machine. We had hardly made a dozen steps in the woods along the twenty-two-mile trail when a rich harvest of Touchardia was found. We found both male and female plants that could be distinguished only by inflorescence. Whereas male flowers are situated on relatively strong, repeadedly forking cymes, growing out of the base of the leaves, female ones look like so many flattened lumps of green dough planted at the base of the top branches. Both plants are taken indiscriminately. Careful discrimination is made, however, in regard to the age of the plant; neither too young nor too old ones are taken. The bark of the old ones is somewhat knotty, woody, and short jointed, and, as I have mentioned, such plant is turned down to the ground to force it to give new shoots. The best stems are not thicker than the finger, about one year and a half old, with the bark of a chocolate-brown color, with distanced scars of former leaves, straight and high (8 to 10 feet), devoid of leaves except on the top. Such stems are cut with the knife near the root and below the crown. Their bark strips easily as a whole from bottom to the top. The ribbon obtained is hung over the neck of the gatherers. There is also a plant with the leaves very much like those of Touchardia, the "hopue"; but this one generally grows to a large-sized tree, has different flower, and light-grayish color of the bark. Neither previous soaking nor drying are resorted to before the extraction. The bark is used raw.

The implements used are: (1) A wood board made of "naou" tree, characterized by its dark color, hardness, compactness, evenness, and absence of knots. This board is about 6 feet long by 2 to 3 inches wide. It has a very light curve in both directions-in width and length; is wider at one end and obtusely

pointed at the other. (2) A plate of fish bone of "honu" fish, about 8 inches long by 21 wide, and is also slightly curved in both directions. Its lower margin is sharpened under 45° like the edge of a chisel.

The process of manufacturing is as follows: The naou" board is fastened on the ground with rocks at the narrow end to prevent any forward sliding, the curved surface uppermost. The broader end is a little elevated by another piece of rock. The board is moistened with water. A ribbon of bark from one plant is taken. Its bottom end is first fastened by treading on it with the toe of the right foot, the top end raised vertically by the left hand, so as to tightly stretch the band. Holding the fish plate by the right hand in its middle, the sharp end of the bone is passed upward along the inner surface of the ribbon, which operation is intended for flattening the curled ribbon and taking off the slimy substance covering the inner surface. Then the ribbon is stretched horizontally upon the naou board, the bottom end toward the wider end of the board and the operator, and held tightly to it by the two fingers of the left hand, the outer surface of the bark upward, the inner sticking to the board. Then the fish plate, held in the right hand by the middle at 45°, with its sharp end downward and forward, squeezing the ribbon between the tool and the board, is repeatedly passed toward the pointed end of the board, by which motion the flesh is scrapped off, leaving a ribbon of fiber. From one to two minutes are required to free the bark of one plant. The operation of scraping is easy, the fiber evidently being located on the inner surface. The fiber thus obtained is dried in the sun.

he picked the plants, stripped them of the bark, and with his own olden tools manufactured the sample of fiber.

My object was to ascertain what kind of plants he selects, and to see the primitive method of manufacture, with the idea that this method might furnish some suggestions for the construction of the machine. We had hardly made a dozen steps in the woods along the twenty-two-mile trail when a rich harvest of Touchardia was found. We found both male and female plants that could be distinguished only by inflorescence. Whereas male flowers are situated on relatively strong, repeadedly forking cymes, growing out of the base of the leaves, female ones look like so many flattened lumps of green dough planted at the base of the top branches. Both plants are taken indiscriminately. Careful discrimination is made, however, in regard to the age of the plant; neither too young nor too old ones are taken. The bark of the old ones is somewhat knotty, woody, and short jointed, and, as I have mentioned, such plant is turned down to the ground to force it to give new shoots. The best stems are not thicker than the finger, about one year and a half old, with the bark of a chocolate-brown color, with dis

tanced scars of former leaves, straight and high (8 to 10 feet), devoid of leaves except on the top. Such stems are cut with the knife near the root and below the crown. Their bark strips easily as a whole from bottom to the top. The ribbon obtained is hung over the neck of the gatherers. There is also a plant with the leaves very much like those of Touchardia, the "hopue"; but this one generally grows to a large-sized tree, has different flower, and light-grayish color of the bark. Neither previous soaking nor drying are resorted to before the extraction. The bark is used raw.

The implements used are: (1) A wood board made of "naou" tree, characterized by its dark color, hardness, compactness, evenness, and absence of knots. This board is about 6 feet long by 2 to 3 inches wide. It has a very light curve in both directions-in width and ler at one end and obtusely

pointed at the other. (2) A plate of fish bone of "honu" fish, about 8 inches long by 24 wide, and is also slightly curved in both directions. Its lower margin is sharpened under 45° like the edge of a chisel.

The process of manufacturing is as follows: The "naou" board is fastened on the ground with rocks at the narrow end to prevent any forward sliding, the curved surface uppermost. The broader end is a little elevated by another piece of rock. The board is moistened with water. A ribbon of bark from one plant is taken. Its bottom end is first fastened by treading on it with the toe of the right foot, the top end raised vertically by the left hand, so as to tightly stretch the band. Holding the fish plate by the right hand in its middle, the sharp end of the bone is passed upward along the inner surface of the ribbon, which operation is intended for flattening the curled ribbon and taking off the slimy substance covering the inner surface. Then the ribbon is stretched horizontally upon the naou board, the bottom end toward the wider end of the board and the operator, and held tightly to it by the two fingers of the left hand, the outer surface of the bark upward, the inner sticking to the board. Then the fish plate, held in the right

hand by the middle at 45°, with its sharp end downward and forward, squeezing the ribbon between the tool and the board, is repeatedly passed toward the pointed end of the board, by which motion the flesh is scrapped off, leaving a ribbon of fiber. From one to two minutes are required to free the bark of one plant. The operation of scraping is easy, the fiber evidently being located on the inner surface. The fiber thus obtained is dried in the sun.

Besides manufacturing fishing nets, natives used to make of it the best of their fishing lines. I am told that whalers in former times paid high prices for olona for making lines for whales. There is an old native in Hilo who still uses the line that was made and used by his grandfather.

COLLEGE OF HAWAII, HONOLULU

VAUGHAN MACCAUGHEY

of letting it blunt itself against the rocks, let us look round for something easier to penetrate. The sun? Well, perhaps. Many have struggled to penetrate the mystery of the interior of the sun; but the difficulties are great, for its substance is denser than water. It may not be quite so bad as Biron makes out in "Love's Labour's Lost":

The heaven's glorious sun; That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks; Small have continual plodders ever won Have base authority from others' books.

But it is far better if we can deal with matter in that state known as a perfect gas, which charms away difficulties as by magic. Where shall it be found?

A few years ago we should have been puzzled to say where, except perhaps in certain nebula; but now it is known that abundant material of this kind awaits investigation. Stars in a truly gaseous state exist in great numbers, although at first sight they are scarcely to be discriminated from dense stars like our sun. Not only so, but the gaseous stars are the most powerful light-givers, so that they force themselves on our attention. Many of the familiar stars are of this kind-Aldebaran, Canopus, Arcturus, Antares; and it would be safe to say that three quarters of the naked-eye stars are in this diffuse state. This remarkable condition has been made known through the researches of H. N. Russell and E. Hertzsprung; the way in which their conclusions, which ran counter to the prevailing thought of the time, have been substantiated on all sides by overwhelming evidence, is the outstanding feature of recent progress in stellar astronomy.

The diffuse gaseous stars are called giants, and the dense stars are called dwarfs. During the life of a star there is presumably a gradual increase of density through contraction, so that these terms distinguish the earlier and later stages of stellar history. It appears that a star begins its effective life as a giant of comparatively low temperature-a red or Mtype star. As this diffuse mass of gas contracts its temperature must rise, a conclusion long ago pointed out by Homer Lane. The

rise continues until the star becomes too dense, and ceases to behave as a perfect gas. A maximum temperature is attained, depending on the mass, after which the star, which has now become a dwarf, cools and further contracts. Thus each temperature-level is passed through twice, once in an ascending and once in a descending stage once as a giant, once as a dwarf. Temperature plays so predominant a part in the usual spectral classification that the ascending and descending stars were not originally discriminated, and the customary classification led to some perplexities. The separation of the two series was discovered through their great difference in luminosity, particularly striking in the case of the red and yellow stars, where the two stages fall widely apart in the star's history. The bloated giant has a far larger surface than the compact dwarf, and gives correspondingly greater light. The distinction was also revealed by direct determinations of stellar densities, which are possible in the case of eclipsing variables like Algol. Finally, Adams and Kohlschütter have set the seal on this discussion by showing that there are actual spectral differences between the ascending and descending stars at the same temperature-level, which are conspicuous enough-when they are looked for.

Perhaps we should not too hastily assume that the direction of evolution is necessarily in the order of increasing density, in view of our ignorance of the origin of a star's heat, to which I must allude later. But, at any rate, it is a great advance to have disentangled what is the true order of continuous increase of density, which was hidden by superficial resemblances.

The giant stars, representing the first half of a star's life, are taken as material for our first boring experiment. Probably, measured in time, this stage corresponds to much less than half the life, for here it is the ascent which is easy and the way down is long and slow. Let us try to picture the conditions inside a giant star. We need not dwell on the vast dimensions-a mass like that of the sun, but swollen to much greater volume on account of the low density, often below that of our own atmos

phere. It is the star as a storehouse of heat which especially engages our attention. In the hot bodies familiar to us the heat consists in the energy of motion of the ultimate particles, flying at great speeds hither and thither. So too in the stars a great store of heat exists in this form; but a new feature arises. A large proportion, sometimes more than half the total heat, consists of imprisoned radiant energyether-waves travelling in all directions trying to break through the material which encages them. The star is like a sieve, which can only retain them temporarily; they are turned aside, scattered, absorbed for a moment, and flung out again in a new direction. An element of energy may thread the maze for hundreds of years before it attains the freedom of outer space. Nevertheless the sieve leaks, and a steady stream permeates outwards, supplying the light and heat which the star radiates all round.

That some ethereal heat as well as material heat exists in any hot body would naturally be admitted; but the point on which we have here to lay stress is that in the stars, particularly in the giant stars, the ethereal portion rises to an importance which quite transcends our ordinary experience, so that we are confronted with a new type of problem. In a redhot mass of iron the ethereal energy constitutes less than a billionth part of the whole; but in the tussle between matter and ether the ether gains a larger and larger proportion of the energy as the temperature rises. This change in proportion is rapid, the ethereal energy increasing rigorously as the fourth power of the temperature, and the material energy roughly as the first power. But even at the temperature of some millions of degrees attained inside the stars there would still remain a great disproportion; and it is the low density of material, and accordingly reduced material energy per unit volume in the giant stars, which wipes out the last few powers of 10. In all the giant stars known to us, widely as they differ from one another, the conditions are just reached at which these two varieties of heat-energy have attained a rough equality; at any rate one can not be neglected compared

with the other. Theoretically there could be conditions in which the disproportion was reversed and the ethereal far out-weighed the material energy; but we do not find them in the stars. It is as though the stars had been measured out-that their sizes had been determined-with a view to this balance of power; and one can not refrain from attributing to this condition a deep significance in the evolution of the cosmos into separate stars.

Study of the radiation and internal conditions of a star brings forward very pressingly a problem often debated in this section: What is the source of the heat which the sun and stars are continually squandering? The answer given is almost unanimous-that it is obtained from the gravitational energy converted as the star steadily contracts. But almost as unanimously this answer is ignored in its practical consequences. Lord Kelvin showed that this hypothesis, due to Helmholtz, necessarily dates the birth of the sun about 20,000,000 years ago; and he made strenuous efforts to induce geologists and biologists to accommodate their demands to this timescale. I do not think they proved altogether tractable. But it is among his own colleagues, physicists and astronomers, that the most outrageous violations of this limit have prevailed. I need only refer to Sir George Darwin's theory of the earth-moon system, to the present Lord Rayleigh's determination of the age of terrestrial rocks from occluded helium, and to all modern discussions of the statistical equilibrium of the stellar system. No one seems to have any hesitation, if it suits him, in carrying back the history of the earth long before the supposed date of formation of the solar system; and in some cases at least this appears to be justified by experimental evidence which it is difficult to dispute. Lord Kelvin's date of the creation of the sun is treated with no more respect than Archbishop Ussher's.

The serious consequences of this contraction hypothesis are particularly prominent in the case of giant stars, for the giants are prodigal