430 Proceedings. 



this kind before it is too late. This, one of the finest of the savage races, 

 ought not to be allowed to pass into decadence before this is done. There 

 are four papers of an anthropometric character in the " Transactions." 

 Three deal with the colour sense of tbe Maori, and to these I shall refer 

 again. One, read before the Wellington Philosophical Society by Mr. Knox, 

 gives a short description of the skeleton of an aboriginal Chatham Islander. 

 It is printed in volume v., and it is quite within our power to write papers of 

 this kind down here. We may not have the living Maori, but we may 

 surely have his bones, at least his skull. Much may be learned from a series 

 of careful measurements of the skull alone, and this is a branch of the 

 subject to which I shall willingly devote myself when opportunity offers. 

 But I find that Maori skulls are not easily got. Collectors of Maori relics 

 usually look on skulls as curios, and hoard them up in little private 

 museums, where they lie hidden during the collector's lifetime, and after 

 his death, not at all improbably, are lost, or, being unauthenticated, become 

 useless for the purpose I speak of. There is nothing to prevent amateurs 

 measuring and recording the skulls in their collections ; but since Broca's 

 time craniometry has become a not particularly easy matter, and the in- 

 struments required are expensive. It is, of course, a simple enough matter 

 to take certain measurements of a skull, but the great value of an inquiry 

 of this kind lies in the results being such as may be compared with the work 

 of others. Thus all measurements ought to be done in the same way, and 

 modern anthropologists almost invariably follow the directions of the dis- 

 tinguished Frenchman I have referred to, and for this system of measure- 

 ments a number of special instruments are required. I hope the time will 

 come when I shall be in a position to publish in our " Transactions " some 

 addition to our knowledge of this subject. The other three papers are 

 devoted to the colour sense of the Maoris, of their power to appreciate and 

 distinguish colours. One of these, by Mr. Stack, is published in volume xii. 

 The remaining two, by Mr. Colenso, are to be found in volume xiv. Perhaps 

 a brief allusion to these papers will not be out of place. Some years ago 

 a theory was propounded that primeval man was colour-blind, that the 

 world to his sense of vision was dull and grey. The sky gave him no 

 sense of blue ; for him there was no green in the forests, no yellow, no red 

 in the flowers or the sunsets ; these and the rainbow affected our ancestors 

 as but mixtures in varying proportions of black and white. That as the 

 centuries passed on our colour sensations gradually came to us, first 

 red, then orange, then yellow, then green, then blue. That the Homeric 

 Greeks were at the stage of being able to distinguish red and yellow with 

 their shades and mixtures, the second stage of the evolution of the colour 

 sense according to this theory. From that day to this the education of this 

 sense has gone on continuously, and we are now able to see the range of 

 colour from red to violet, but much of the spectrum is yet unmastered. 

 The principal supporters of this theory are Mr. Gladstone and Dr. Magnus, 

 a German oculist. It is mainly by philological arguments that they 

 endeavour to convince us of the truth of their theory, but it would be out of 

 place to discuss the question now, suffice it to say that much was written on 

 both sides in 1877 and 1878, and that two of the papers were read by Mr. 

 Stack. If cultured Homeric man had a feeble colour sense, if green and 

 blue had not then emerged from the pervading grey, then savage man of the 

 present day will also most probably to some extent be colour blind. Mr. 

 Stack, therefore, gives us the result of his 30 years' experience of the Maoris 

 in this matter. Unfortunately, he looks at this experience in the light of 

 the new discovery, and tries to make the two agree. The result is curious. 

 He states decidedly that the Maoris have a very feeble colour sense in all 

 colours ; but though they are in advance of the besiegers of Troy, in that they 

 have a certain slight appreciation of green, they were till quite lately still 

 blind to blue, the colour they use in tatooing ; also that on the arrival of the 

 Europeans they all at oner had revealed to them the entire scale of colour. 

 This paper is not convincing, and is mainly interesting as being the cause of 



