140 half brown, flowers and blossoms hung about their throats and bodies, and their lava lavas were decor- ated with a sort of trailing vine. They arranged themselves in a circle around a drum pit dug in the ground and at a given signal from the dance leader, (a mari, or woman), commenced to sing and dance. Neither the music or the form of the dance struck me as being anything in particular in the way of melody or aesthetics. The first sounded as though it was close to the Greek diatonic scale, with not sufficient variation to engage one accustomed to a musical range of greater proportions. If there was melody present I could not uncover it, and the memory of the music will always be associated in my mind as rhythm, a sort of summum bonum of rhythm, as rhythm unadulterated. The dance was what I had always imagined a Solomon Island dance to be. It is just a little bit worse than the Hawaiian hula- an insane, wild, immoder- ate, unspeakably disenchanted affair. All of us went back to the ship before the entire assemblage fell to feasting. From the appearance of the village the following morning, fragments of food, fruit, etc., thrown about, and the natives all sound asleep long after sunrise, this part of the performance must have been pretty venerable. On the whole the Treasury Islander appears to be a superior native to most of those in the Solomons.