S. p. Smith. — Tongarcica, or Pcnrlujn Island. 99 



was not eaten. It is believed that human flesh was eaten on 

 very rare occasions. 



Such, then, are some of the customs of the Penrhyn- 

 Islanders ; and I think it will be allowed that they resemble 

 those of the Maori in many remarkable particulars. Stern- 

 dale says that the people of Eakahanga, Manihiki, and Tonga- 

 rewa call themselves maori. It is quite probable that this is 

 so, and, though the word cannot be taken as having a racial 

 meaning, it is naturally applied to themselves as distinguished 

 from foreigners. The word may be translated as — indigenous, 

 native, common, ordinary, &c. ; and it was possibly never 

 heard of as a racial and descriptive name until contact with 

 foreigners necessitated its use. 



In the following list of names of people and words, I have, 

 where necessary, reduced the spelling to the form commonly 

 used in Maori, after a careful study of the sound of each word, as 

 given in the peculiar style of spelling adopted by jNIr. Lamont, 

 which is a compound of English and Polynesian. There are, 

 no doubt, errors in some of them, but not, I trust, many. I 

 hope they will prove of interest to the philologist until a 

 better collection is procured, though I fear that is not likely 

 now to occur. It was found by the Earotongan native mis- 

 sionaries that the language was so similar to their own that 

 the Scriptures, written in Earotongan, were at once in- 

 troduced, and from them the people learnt to read and write ; 

 and thus probably the native dialect would die out together 

 with the people, who number now but a small remnant of 

 those who lived there thirty-live years ago, in Lamont's time. 

 Sterndale says that at least a thousand of them were taken 

 away by Peruvian slavers to work in the mines of that country. 

 Judging from Lamont's spelling of the words, there are two 

 peculiarities of pronunciation which are worthy of note : the 

 first is, that when the letter " i " follows "t," it has the sound 

 of " chi " — as taiuaichi, mstead of tanuiiti, as in Maori. It is 

 somewhat strange that the Moriori of the Chatham Islands — 

 separated from Tongarew^a by over two thousand miles of 

 ocean — has the same pronunciation of the same letter ; and, 

 if we may trust Mariner, the same thing is found in Tonga. 

 The second peculiarity is one we are more accustomed to in 

 the Ngapuhi dialect, but is found in no other tribe in New- 

 Zealand. The Tongarewans appear to pronounce the " h " 

 as if it had an "s" before it. This is illustrated in the 

 works of early visitors to New Zealand, where such words 

 as Hokianga, Hauraki, Hongi, itc, were spelled Shokianga, 

 Shauraki, Shongi, &c. Those who know the Ngapuhi dialect 

 will recognise that there is some justification for this mode 

 of spelling, although the sound intended to be repre- 



