302 INTELLECTUAL ENDOWMENTS. [1840. 



delicate mats, than in the erection of their habitations. They 

 have shown a singular aptitude in accustoming themselves to 

 the usages of civilized life. Of poetry they have an abund- 

 ance, chiefly of a lyrical kind ; rude it is, indeed, yet they 

 are not entire strangers to metre and quantity. They have 

 a passionate attachment for music, and, in fact, noise of any 

 kind is scarcely ever unwelcome to them. Their voices are 

 monotonous, and when singing pitched in a high key. They 

 have their war dances and love dances, and sometimes sham 

 fights : these are much like exhibitions of a similar character 

 throughout Polynesia, very picturesque by candlelight, but 

 not bearing the full glare of day, and always tiresome on 

 repetition. 



It is customary, however, among the New Zealanders, on 

 almost every occasion of ceremony, be it a funeral festivity, 

 or a dance, to intersperse the proceedings with discharges of 

 fire arms, the noise produced by which seems to afford them 

 real delight. 



Surprising though it may be, they have a kind of astronomy 

 among them ; and like all Polynesians, they appear to have a 

 faint, though imperfect idea of the creation. In regard to 

 their own origin, they have no tradition, except that their an- 



tors came from the east in canoes, sewed together with 

 sennit.* While they have given no names to their islands, 

 strangely enough, there is not a single thing in the animal or 

 vegetable creation, for which they have not a distinct appella- 

 tive term by which it is generally known. 



There was not originally, at the time of the discovery, any 



* They have likewise a tradition, that their kumara, or sweet potato was 

 brought from the east. Might not those islands, then, have been visited by 

 South American Indians, who found them peopled with Malays, or Papuans, 

 and from whom the present inhabitants have descended 1 — or did the ancestors 

 of the latter come from some of the intermediate isles of the Pacific 7 The ease 

 with which the New Zealander and the Tahitian converse, on first meeting each 

 other. ha6 before been remarked (ante p. 178) ; and it is by no moans improbable, 

 that the canoes, the memory of which is preserved in the traditions of the former, 

 may have originally come from the Soiet\ Is], mils. Nevertheless, how true it 

 is, that the more ethnology b studied the more speculative it seems to become. 



