Tregear. — The Mauri in Asia. 2: J 



and legends whicli have come down to us from days which date 

 centuries before a European keel divided the Pacific. 



Although, as I said in my introduction, I shall trespass on 

 the ground of the geologist in the briefest manner, it would be 

 wrong not to notice the evidence forced upon us by discoveries 

 in New Zealand. Dr. Vou Haast, F.R.S., says, in an article on 

 the Moa-hunters, in which he judges from the polished stoue 

 implements found in the caves with the broken Moa bones, that 

 the men who hunted the Moa lived ages ago : " Of course it is 

 impossible to calculate this time by even hundreds of years, but 

 as polished stone implements have been found in New Zealand 

 buried in littoral beds, 15 feet below the surface, in undisturbed 

 ground over which extensive forests are growing, containing 

 trees of enormous size, there is no doubt that the use of polished 

 stone implements dates far back in pre-historic times ; I mean 

 to say, to a period to which even the most obscure traditions of 

 the aborigines do not reach." Mr. McKay, of the Geological 

 Department, writing on the same subject, says : " Thus we are 

 led to suppose that a people, prior to the advent of the present 

 stock, were the exterminators of the Moa, always accepting as 

 incontrovertible that the immigration alluded to did not take 

 place 1,000 years earlier than stated in the said traditions on 

 the subject. But in the meantime, accepting the 350 years, and 

 treating 1,850 as a wild notion which the science of the subject 

 has never yet dreamed of, let us see if the 350 years will be suffi- 

 cient for the accomplishment of all that of necessity must be 

 performed by these immigrants and their descendants." Auother 

 branch of science, Philology, will not, I feel assured, treat the 

 early advent of the Maori as a " wild notion"; the trouble Lias 

 been occasioned by the- too great credence given by Maori 

 scholars to the value of oral genealogies, &c. Sir George Grey 

 ha3 kindly allowed me to quote his authority for the following 

 statement. He for years has believed that the Maoris must 

 have inhabited New Zealand much longer than has been stated, 

 the 350 years giving no possible space of time in which the 

 enormous fortifications, &c, could have been erected, and the 

 country populated densely in the North Island — in many cases, 

 huge trees requiring centuries to gain their present bulk having 

 grown out of the deserted defences. On leaving New Zealaud 

 for Africa, he took his Polynesian experiences of legend, &c, 

 and compared them with those of other primitive races, such as 

 the Kaffirs, Hottentots, &c, and cam- to the conclusion that the 

 human memory did not retain legendary personality beyond the 

 tenth or twelfth generation — that after the grandfather, the 

 fourth, the fifth, the sixth ancestor, the Man was getting very 

 shadowy, that back to the twelfth they were into myth, the 

 Man had gone; in myth-laud they could remember and sail 

 away grandly, and even make no mistakes, in comparison with 



