454 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



It is probable that the Polynesian, deprived of the living 

 animal, kept this form of the cow-word chiefly for mysterious 

 ideas engendered of darkness — that is, of the simple word 

 (po), although in many compound words, clear as the agglu- 

 tinated Polynesian vocables show formation, no possible twist 

 of sense can make the " night " meaning of ^w seem reason- 

 able. There are words like po-haha — ripped up ; po-hnhu — 

 swarming, in crowds ; po-lca — to pierce ; 2)o-nini — to have a 

 red light, to glow ; 'po-ivMri — to whisk ; po-pU — to crowd 

 around, to throng; p)opu — to pat with the hand, &c. What 

 have these to do with night or Hades? And what mean the 

 names of the first great Po's descendants — Po-tuturi, Po- 

 pepeke, &c.? Tuturi means "to kneel," i\,n(\ pcpehe "to leap." 

 All these are probably cattle-words. It will be noticed that I 

 have spoken of the cow, bull, ox, &c., indifi^erently : these 

 words constantly shift sense in all ancient languages ; it is 

 supposed that there was no verbal gender in primitive Aryan. 

 Sanscrit go {gaus) is ox, cow, constellation Taurus :'"' Irish 

 ho, a cow : Latin hos, an ox, bull, or cow ; tazmcs, an 

 ox ; taura, a barren cow : Welsh buw, a cow ; hivla, a bull : 

 Greek fSo'iKo?, belonging to a bull or cow. 



As the word p>o seems to have been retained in Polynesian 

 for the mythic sense, so kau appears to have taken a more 

 practical use. Let us attempt to find its etymology — not in 

 the inflected languages, with their thousands of years of over- 

 growth, but in the most primitive dialects we can find. Pro- 

 fessor Max Miiller, in his " Stratification of Language," gives 

 the Chinese word ngau-7i as " cow-milk " {ngau-=cow). In 

 Maori the word for milk is waiu {ivai-u), "breast- water." But 

 the ngau for "cow" compares with a Polynesian word ngau, to 

 chew, to bite (gnaw^) ; and, altered as this word may have been 

 in the long process of time, still, as gaii, gao, huh, chuo (forms 

 of "cow"), it still has its origin in the "ruminant" idea. 

 Etymologists have hitherto considered "cow" as a derivative 

 from yGU "to bellow;" or, rather, reversing this process, they 

 have. been led back to the root by this and similar words. To 

 men in the " hunting " stage, the bellowing sound would pro- 

 bably be the most distinctive attribute of the bovine species ; 

 but when the pastoral life superseded that of the hunter the 

 fact of cattle "chevv'ing the cud " became too deeply associated 

 with this word not to cover the sense of " bellowing." (Con- 

 cerning the lowing noise, I shall speak more fully under the 

 root MU.) I must remind you that ng and k interchange in 

 Ma^ri, as in all Polynesian and European languages. The 

 ngaio {kxvu) words in Polynesian are as follows : Maori, ngau, 



" The Hawaiianscall t!ie Tcaurus constellation (or, rather, Aldebaran) 

 Tiuo. 



