A REMARKABLE MAORI MANUSCRIPT. 291 



money spent in collecting and identifying fossils is en- 

 tirely wasted, and this the dear people's money. 



I have not reached the end of this system of scientific 

 spoliation. Under such pretexts the man with a hammer 

 went all over the province with his hammer in one hand 

 and a leather bag in the other. He strolled along the 

 courses of the rivers and smaller streams, gazing at the 

 blank rocks, making diagrams of the cliffs, describing the 

 strata, collecting, assorting and labeling the fossils, so as 

 to know afterward what locality and stratum had yielded 

 each one. He loitered about all the stone-quarries, both- 

 ering the workmen with idle questions; he knocked stone 

 walls to pieces ; he sauntered , across the fields ; he boated 

 aloncf the shores of the lakes: he clambered over the cliffs 

 of the mountains, and everywhere, with hammer and 

 bag, he gathered fossils and samples of the rocks. It was 

 a vain and frivolous expenditure of the people's money. 

 Any inanga-catcher could have told him where all the 

 cliffs were along the river or lake shore; and could have 

 told him there was not an ounce of coal or a pint of oil 

 in the whole valley of the Waitangi ; and any hapuku- 

 spearer could have given similar information about the 

 whole west coast of Ota^-o. 



What did he proceed to do with these collections? He 

 took them home, and occupied himself through the win- 

 ter in handling them over, placing them here and there, 

 and then placing them back again, as a child forever re- 

 arranges its playthings. He sawed them into thin slices 

 and examined them with microscopes ; he turned them 

 over and over, he studied every point, and made every 

 imaginable comparison ; he drew innumerable pictures, 

 and wrote books full of descriptions, and had the audacity 



