On an Inscribed Wooden Tablet from Easter Island (Rapa Nui), in the British Museum.

Although the Polynesians were able to represent humani, animal, and natural forms, which in some cases they conventionalised to a remarkable degree, nowhere but in Easter Island, the extreme outpost of the race, do we find anything approaching a regular system of writing.Here and there we hear of chiefs attesting, treaties with Europeans by " making their marks ; btut in one of the recorded instances the Mlaories used signs resembling their tattooing, and quite different from those here in question,* in the other, the native coutracting parti-es were themselves chiefs of Rapa Nui.t Tbe occurrence, in a lonely and isolated spot, of a script already to a certain extent conventionalised, and therefore not absolutely primitive, has naturally given rise to various speculations whichl it will be necessary to pass briefly in review.Before proceeding to this task I will mention the most imnportant visits made to the island by European and American vessels, and totuch upon the settlement of the missionaries, which, by establishing closer relations with the inhabitants, brought the inscribed tablets into general notice.The first white men to land upon Rapa Nui were the Dutch Captain Roggewein and his companions, who gave the island the name it now commonly bears, becaulse their discovery fell upon Easter Day, 1721.Betweeni this time and the latter half of thle nineteenth century it was visited by many navigators, amorg others by Captain Cook, and its remarkable monolith statues and stone buildings were made known to the western world.The tablets, however, seemed to have escaped notice until the year 1864, when their existence was discovered by Eugene Eyraud, lay brother of the congregation of the Sacred Heart of Piepus, who had repatriated three of the islanders kidnapped by the Peruvians J in the previous year.It is in a letter of his to the superior of his order ?that the first mention of tablets is made.As a result of Eyraud's visit the conlgregatioll soon afterwards established on the island a small mission, whose members during the short and troubled period of their residence were largely instrumental, as we shall see, in preserving what remained of the Easter Island inscriptions.The first tablets to leave the island were probably two discovered by Father Zumbohm, and sent by him to Bishop Jaussen, of Axieri, Vicar Apostolic of Tahiti, to whom five othey examples were confided in 1868.11In the same year H.M.S. Topaze passed some time at Easter Island, anld various accounts of her visit have been published.?[.To the officers of thlis ship we owe the two large monolithic statues now in the British Museum, but tablets do not seem to have comte under their notice.Soon after the departure of the Topaze three, tablets appear to have been found, two of which were given to Captain Gana of the Chilian corvette O'Jliggins, which touched at Rapa INui in 1870.**Captain Gana deposited hig two specimens in the Museum of Santiago in Chile, where they still are; the third tablet was sent off to Paris, but never reached its destination, It was from casts taken from the Chilian examples and forwarded to Europe that the first attempts to decipher the