White. — On the Bird Moa and its Aliases. 271 



"ngarara with the general name" to become move obscure, 

 for he of his own thoughts made the creature to be an iguana. 

 No doubt he was surprised to see the small size of his 

 specimen tuatara, but may have got over that by thinking it a 

 young one. 



That the Maori ever ate a tuatara as ordinary food is 

 highly improbable, for the Maoris have the greatest dread of 

 all kinds of lizards. One species, Naultinus elegans, "if a 

 man look at or let it fix its eyes on his own, is a cause of im- 

 mediate death to that man."* How, then, would a Maori dare 

 to eat such baneful creatures ? May we not rather suppose 

 that ngarara, with the suffix, was for some reason used by 

 certain tribes to denote the Dinornis sp. ? 



I would further suggest that the word ngarara may be a 

 corruption or misused for ngara and ngangara, to snarl, allied 

 to rara, to roar, kara, to call ; Tahitian, arara, hoarse through 

 calling, hoarseness ; and beyond Polynesian proper, Macas- 

 sar, ngangara, to shriek. Possibly the male bird (moa) was 

 ngarara, the one who called in a hoarse voice, the nasal 

 sound " ng " being used as a prefix to arara or rara, to roar, 

 which is lost in Tahitian arara, to call in a hoarse voice. The 

 ngarara was the loud-calling male bird, and his mate, the 

 female bird, was called "moa." In Moa-whango, a place- 

 name, we get the hoarse-voiced moa, similar to ngarara when 

 rendered " the hoarse-voiced one." 



This would account for the saying that the two creatures 

 ngarara (the male) and moa (the female) lived in partnership in 

 caves on the mountain-side. Then ng-arara-liua-rau and 

 karara-hua-rau, a monster killed at Wairarapa by Tara, was 

 the hoarse-voiced male moa and his numerous progeny, and 

 not a saurian monster with numerous descendants. 



This we can readily believe, for have we not the bones of 

 all kinds of moas with us at this day, and in some places found 

 piled in heaps, as it were, evidence that the Maori had sur- 

 rounded flocks of moa and forced many into the waters of 

 swamps and lakes, at which places we now get bones in one 

 large collection in a small area ? But we find no evidence of 

 any monster saurian having lived in Tertiary times in New 

 Zealand, nor can we thus account for the numerous descend- 

 ants indicated by the suffix hua-rau, and so we may safely 

 conclude that ng arara- hua-rau was the male moa and his 

 attendant females, with their young, which the Maori at one 

 time was accustomed to destroy wholesale. 



It is currently reported among many scientists that we 



* " Departed spirits are said to transfer themselves into this and the 

 former species, and the natives regard them therefore with a certain 

 dread, calling them atuas or gods." (Dieffenbach, vol. ii., p. 203.) 



