THE MIND'S BEST WORK

THE MIND'S BEST WORK

Ergonomics

he Dutchman Roggeveen discovered Easter Island, a wink of
land far from all the major island groups of the Pacific, on Easter
Day 1722. Along with the island, he discovered a mystery. Scattered across the terrain were enormous stone faces with torsos,
many tumbled down but, in Roggeveen's day, some few still
standing on pedestals. The upright ones wore on their heads
large topknots of a differently colored stone. In 1840, the last one
to be toppled still looked over the treeless vista of the island. Perched on a wall the height of a man, its thirty-two-foot-tall body
weighed about fifty tons. The topknot, weighing perhaps ten
tons, had a volume ofsomething like two hundred cubic feet. The
main figure wastwo and a half milesfrom the quarry where it had
been carved.

D.N. Perkins

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1981

English