522 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



they were made, but all my informant could tell me was that 

 it took a long time, and that the old men would sit in the sun 

 and grind away, humming at it all the time. He put the 

 action to the word, and described circles round the eyes of a hei- 

 Uhi I had, at the same time doing a hissing hum. The de- 

 scription seemed to me very natural, because the humming 

 would counteract, so to say, the monotonous grating of the 

 operation." 



Though the best authorities agree that the hei-tiJd w^as 

 not made in this Island, this must be taken subject to an ex- 

 ception. Major Heaphy, in his account of his visit to Arahura 

 in 1846, says that he there saw hei-tikis receiving their last 

 polish. The inhabitants of that place consisted largely of 

 Ngatitoa and Ngatiraukawa conquerors, who had formed a 

 part of Eauparaha's West Coast expedition, and it was pro- 

 bably some of these North Island people who had recently 

 introduced this art. 



2. Te Wai Pounamu. 



The weight of authority is agamst Mr. Wohlers on the 

 subject of the name of this (South) Island, though Major 

 Heaphy and a few others take the same view. Wahi Pounamu 

 would mean " place of greenstone," though a Maori has told me 

 that it is an inadmissible form of expression. Wai Pounamu 

 means " water of greenstone." He suggests that the former is 

 correct, and that it applied to the district where the stone was 

 found. The pronunciation of the two words is very different. 

 Captain Cook, in his way of spelling, wrote "TovyPoenammoo." 

 He treats " Te Wai" as one word, in which case the short vowel 

 might without great inaccuracy be written " o," and was so 

 written by other writers of later date, until the missionaries 

 reformed and settled the Maori orthography. He fancied, pro- 

 bably with truth, that the "w" was there a " v," as he often 

 writes it so ; and he gave " y " as the English equivalent for the 

 long vowel-sound which w^e now write " ai. " By no process can 

 " Te W^ahi " be got out of his word. Had he heard it he would 

 have written it " Vahee" or " Wahee." Cook got the name from 

 an old man at Queen Charlotte Sound. Speaking of the land 

 south of Cook Strait, he says, " This land, he [the old man] 

 says, consisted of two whennuas, or islands, which may be 

 circumnavigated in a few days, and which he called ' Tovy 

 Poennammoo.' The literal meaning of this word is ' the 

 water of green talc ; ' and probably if we had understood him 

 better we should have found that ' Tovy Poennammoo ' was the 

 name of some particular place where they got the green talc 

 of which they make their ornaments and tools, and not a 

 general name for the whole southern district." 



In his narrative of the third voyage the geographical ques- 



