Henry Balfour[1] supposes that they represent hair and Sir Everard im Thurn[2] that they are wigs. The crowns are made of a material different from that of the rest of the statues, being composed of a vesicular red tufa, and Mr. Balfour bases his conjecture that they represent hair on the supposition that this tufa resembles the frizzly Melanesian hair. He supposes that the red colour was intended to imitate the orange-yellow colour which is now frequently produced in the Pacific, and especially in the Solomons and New Guinea, by bleaching with lime. The cylindrical shape is ascribed to the necessity of rolling the crowns from the place where they were manufactured to the images upon which they were to be superposed.
This hypothesis altogether fails to explain why the crowns are found only on the statues of the burial-places and not on those which lined the roads. Moreover, it involves the supposition, which I believe to be contradicted by all we know of such societies as those of Polynesia and Melanesia, that the people went to the vast trouble of constructing these crowns through the aesthetic motive that the hair of the statues should resemble, and even then only very distantly, the hair of living man.
I believe that there is only one motive strong enough to have led the makers of the statues to add these crowns and transmit the necessity for their manufacture to their descendants. Religion alone is able to provide such a motive, and an observation of Tautain[3] in the Marquesas confirms the conclusion, already suggested by the locality of the crown-bearing statues, that the religious motive in this case arose out of the cult of the dead. In the Marquesas a great stone is placed as a sign of mourning on the head of the image representing a dead man. As
