OBITUARY. 





AUGUSTUS HAMILTON. 



Augustus Hamilton was born at Poole, Dorset, in the year 1854. He 

 was educated at Dorset County School and at the Epsom Medical College. 



In 1876 he came to New Zealand, and taught successively at Thorndon, 

 Okarito, and Petane. While at the last-named school he began his long 

 connection with the New Zealand Institute by becoming Secretary to the 

 Hawke's Bay Philosophical Society. The museum of this Society is a 

 memorial of his work. In 1890 Hamilton was appointed Registrar of the 

 University of Otago. The period of his Registrarship was by far the most 

 productive in his life, as is indicated by the great list of papers on botany, 

 zoology, and ethnology in the " Transactions of the New Zealand Institute " 

 for those years. In his later years at Otago he was engaged on his great 

 work " Maori Art," which overshadows all his other contributions to science. 

 In 1903 he was appointed Director of the Colonial Museum, and his energies 

 thereafter were employed in increasing the ethnological, historical, and 

 entomological collections of that institution. Latterly he was troubled by 

 ill health, and his death, which occurred at the Bay of Island,s on the 

 12th October, 1913, came as the result of a paralytic stroke. 



The range of Hamilton's knowledge was remarkable. At one time or 

 another he wrote papers of value on almost every branch of natural science. 

 His achievement in the field of ethnology will be discussed later. Next 

 in importance comes his long series of hand-lists or bibliographies. These 

 are all of great practical value to students, and deal with such varied sub- 

 jects as New Zealand botany, ferns, fossil Bryozoa, Dinornithidae, fishes 

 and fishing, geology, and the Maori race. 



He was, above all things, a collector and systematizer, whether as a 

 zoologist among the bones at Castle Rocks, or as a botanist in the wilds 

 of southern Westland and on Macquarie Island, or as the gatherer of his 

 unrivalled collection of New Zealand stamps, or, most of all, as a collector 

 of objects throwing light on the life, industry, and art of the ancient Maori. 



Hamilton was the sole worker among New Zealand ethnologists in a 

 department that among the ethnologists of Europe and America is perhaps 

 more strongly manned than any other. Avoiding the investigations already 

 afoot as to sociology, anthropometry, linguistics, and the history and 

 mythology of the Maoris, he turned his 'energies entirely to the study of 

 industrial processes and to the collection and description of objects of every 

 kind that threw light upon Maori art. It is remarkable that though each 

 of those other fields has had many workers, and in each some excellent work 

 has been done, there has as yet been only one systematic worker in the field 

 of Maori technology and art— a department which, from the tangible nature 

 of its subject-matter, its aesthetic appeal, and the information it may yield 

 on race-history and race-affinities, is the most attractive of them all. The 

 history of Hamilton's ethnological work is the history of this department 

 of the science in New Zealand. 



