Easter Is. Glyphs

Probably Belong to Much Later Period Than Statue-makers

Tahiti, Dec. 14.

IHAVE been looking again at the prob lems of the Easter Island glyphs.

A re-examination of my sources of information has convinced me that there is not the slightest evidence to connqpt the celebrated inscribed wooden tablets with the very remote period of image sculpture on Easter. It is clear that the present inhabitants bear no relationship with the ancient artisans who carved those grim guardians.

Men so indefatigable as workers in stone—had they possessed any system of ideographs—would not have entrusted the perpetuation of their literature (whether sacred or common) to. perish able tablets of wood. Nor would any island timber have survived the long centuries following the departure of the last of the original inhabitants.

Two interpretations of the mystical script have been described by Mr. Wil liam Churchill, in the introduction of his scholarly “Easter Island”: “In the first volume of the Journal of the Polynesian Society (1892) Dr. A. Car roll, of New South Wales, undertook to read them. The reading was far too glib; it was a record of obscure events upon the slopes of the Andes, Called upon to explain the principles of inter pretation, Dr Carroll vanishes from the record.

“Paymaster Thomson was an eye-wit ness of the reading of the hieroglyphs by an Easter Islander. He has to acknow ledge that a fraud was practised upon him by the reader. Yet he offers what purports to be the text and translation of several of these tablet records . . .

“The translation can have no value save only insofar as it shows that Dr.

Carroll’s version is in no wise concerned with the same part of the world.”

A generation of vipers has grown up on Easter —and on many other islands as well —whose delight has been to lead unsuspecting scientists into enticing by paths which invariably end in the deserts of confusion worse confounded.

These gentry—foreseeing the day when scientists (now gnawing at their chains in the dismal, dusty apartments of their museums) will again be free to ransack the islands—are, no doubt, preparing new material to astonish and excite the investigators.

The obvious and logical explanation that the hieroglyphs of Easter Island tab lets are merely mnemonic symbols, designed to guide the priesthood of a lately-arrived neo-Polynesian tribe, through the intricate complications of elaborate ritual, would rob them of their mystery and, at the same time, destroy a thriving industry.

Many prows will be pointed toward

Easter in the not distant future.-

Acr.