574 Transactions. — MUcellaneom. 



and in that form makes the distinctive part in the name of the 

 well-known southern lake, the so-called Whakatipu (not to men- 

 tion the still more favoured " Wakatip !") which, as was loug 

 since pointed out, (by Dr. Shortland, I believe,) should be 

 Whakatipua, i.e., Whangatipua, "the creek (or lake) of the mon- 

 ster," an appropriate name, as he, I think, suggests, in the days 

 of canoe navigation. 



"Another most interesting word," says Mr. Tregear, " reo, 

 ' speech or language,' has its exact equivalent in the Greek rheo. 

 Piheo meant ' to flow swiftly :' as a river word we find it in the 

 Rhine, Rhone, etc. ; in New Zealand we find it as re-rc, ' a water- 

 fall.' But there was another meaning for rheo, that of ' speaking 

 quickly.' From the Anglo-Saxon form, reord, came our English 

 word ' to read' ; so that two English words (' read' and ' rhetoric') 

 have Maori brotherhood through reo, ' speech.' " But, accord- 

 ing to Liddell and Scott, rheo, " flow," is from root SRU, whence 

 our word " stream," the s being lost in Greek and Latin : while 

 rheo, say, and " rhetoric," (or, rather, the latter, for the former 

 is a supposed word,) is from root ER or VER, whence also appa- 

 rently, or from a nearly allied root, come Latin vei-bum, and our 

 "word;" "read," on the other hand, according to Skeat, is 

 from the root RADH. If this is so, our poor reo, being equally 

 related to them all, will surely be left in the midst of these three 

 roots, SRU, VER, and RADH — areonanu; a "much mixed," 

 and (perhaps in a somewhat new sense) " confused" reo — like a 

 donkey between three equally tempting, but far apart, bundles 

 of hay. 



I will only take one more word, and that as illustrating the 

 difference between " the method of insight" and "the method 

 of investigation." The word is the Maori raknu, a tree. It is 

 treated by Mr. Tregear in this way: "Sanskrit, ruhk (Pali 

 rukkho), a tree, Maori rakau, a tree" — and that is all : the 

 reader is supplied with that amount of objective information, 

 the rest he is by the theory expected to supply himself. Dr. 

 Codriugton also has occasion to treat of the same word. He 

 shows that it is composed of two roots RA and KAU, and he 

 traces these through a large number of island languages, which 

 his investigations have shown to be related.''' The latter, KAU, 

 he says, appears in 28 out of the 33 words given by Mr. Wallace 

 for the Malay Archipelago ; and in 37 out of 40 of his own 

 Melanesian list. It is therefore most widely spread, and of ex- 

 treme antiquity. The form varies remarkably, from btyu, haiju, 

 kasn, hazu, kait, hau, kai, mjai, down to (ti and ei, and even. Dr. 

 Codriugton believes, to ie — a very long way from the beginning, 



• " Melanesian Languages," p. 95. I hope it will not be thought pre- 

 sumptuous in an outsider to express the opinion that this work will mark an 

 epoch in Polynesian philology, by showing the fundamental relation between 

 the Tolynesian and Melanesian languages. 



