Fourteenth Annual Meeting. 547 



annual meeting. Committees might be set up to deal with them, and deputations to 

 the Ministers concerned might be arranged, and other steps taken to impress upon 

 the Government the need for taking action. 



I must not omit to refer to the first meeting of the Board of Science and Art, a 

 body which has great potentialities in regard to science. The first meeting was called 

 by the Hon. the Minister of Internal Affairs immediately after our last annual meeting. 

 As the President of this Institute is ex officio a member, I had to take my place on 

 that Board in the evening, though I was only elected your President in the afternoon. 

 The Board considered at some length a report by the Director of the Museum as to the 

 future of the Museum. It was agreed that the present site is the best one for a museum 

 and art gallery, and a plan of the building was laid before us. It was re olved that 

 a fireproof building should be erected as soon as possible, the building to be part of 

 the completed plan. The Minister was most sympathetic, and gave us reason to hope 

 that the money would be found for its erection; but Cabinet, I presume, was indisposed 

 to make the necessary grant at a time when the Dominion is requiring so much money 

 for other and more pressing purposes. It is a matter for deep regret that former 

 Governments had postponed the erection of so important a structure. It is a standing 

 disgrace to the Dominion that the extremely valuable and irreplaceable collection of 

 Maori objects is housed in the inflammable building in which we sit. 



Protection has been accorded to our native birds, to some extent to native plants 

 and insects, by preservation of national reserves, and steps have been taken by Act of 

 Parliament to prevent the removal of Maori antiquities from New Zealand ; but there 

 is another set of historical records for which some sort of protection is needed — 

 the early pre-Maori rock paintings of Canterbury and North Otago. These rock 

 paintings, in red and black, occur on the walls of rock shelters, and have received some 

 description at the hands of Mantell, von Haast, and Hamilton — some of whom 

 attempted to give explanations of these extraordinarily varied objects, all of which 

 are totally unlike any of the designs occurring in the carvings of the Maoris. During 

 this last year these rock shelters have been inspected by an American visitor, 

 Mr. James Lee Elmore, who has taken a good deal of interest in similar objects 

 in South Africa and Australia. He has made tracings of all these pictographs in the 

 known shelters, adding a very great deal to what had previously been recorded by 

 Hamilton, and discovered new shelters. Mr. Elmore allowed photographs of these 

 tracings to be made, and from them we have obtained a plan of each such group of 

 pictographs, arranged in true relative position, in case their juxtaposition may have 

 some meaning. There is now in the Otago Museum a complete set of these reproduc- 

 tions. But the Otago Institute went farther : it commissioned Mr. Elmore to remove 

 some of these designs from shelters which are now exposed to weather and so being 

 destroyed. Needless to say, he got permission to do so from the freeholders. But while 

 some of the shelters are on private property, others are on Crown land, or land owned 

 "by a County Council, and it is most desirable that some means of protecting these 

 pictographs should be devised, as some of the shelters are in danger of being destroyed. 

 I tliink a small committee might, if you think it desirable, be set up to consider 

 what steps, if any, can be taken to protect these extremely interesting records of the 

 earliest inhabitants who have left permanent traces of their existence in these Islands. 

 I hope, too, that a detailed and well-illustrated account of these extensive and varied 

 pictographs will be published. 



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