388 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



long-continued action. It would be easy to procure from such 

 natural agencies sufficient fire to become the source of warmth 

 to the body, and to ignite fuel for cooking food. This, too, may 

 explain why it was necessary to go downward to regain the lost 

 element; below was the great fire-source, plain to the sense of 

 the primitive man as to our perceptions." Whether the Maori 

 race had its cradle in some land where such natural fires were 

 procurable, has yet to be proven ; but we must not forget that 

 one of the most learned of our Polynesian scholars expressly 

 affirms his opinion, that the Hawaiki of the Polynesian race 

 (whether as source, or as temporary resting-place,) was a land 

 near a great volcano. Judge Fornander, of Hawaii, considers 

 that Hawa-iki was a name of Java (Hawa), translating iki in 

 its South Marquesan sense, as "raging, furious with heat;" 

 and then the author quotes from an ancient Marquesan song 

 concerning this Hawaii, or Hawaiki: "Tai mamao, uta oa tu 

 te ii " — "a distant sea (or far-off region), away inlaud stands the 

 volcano, "f 



The Island of Hawaii (Sandwich Islands) may also have 

 been thus named, after the prior locality, by reason of its great 

 volcano, Kilauea. 



It would seem that no such tribal or racial locality of birth- 

 place is necessary to account for the use of fire before the dis- 

 covery of its production by the friction of wood. The classical 

 form of the fire-raising story, as given by the oldest Greek and 

 Latin writers, has many resemblances in detail to the Polynesian 

 tradition. Prometheus was, like Maui, not only " the thief of 

 fire from heaven," but also, like Maui, " surpassed all mankind 

 in cunning and fraud" (Lempriere). This, however, does not 

 detract from the excellence of their character in the eyes of our 

 simple forerunners ; cunning, like that of Odysseus, had its fair 

 share of admiration ; in the words of one of our distinguished 

 critics of Greek literature, " Even the highest conception of 

 deity in Homer does not exclude the element of fraud."]: This 

 cunning displayed itself in Prometheus by his deception of 

 Zeus, when the choice of sacrifices was offered ; and it was on 

 account of this sacrilegious disrespect that Zeus took fire away 

 from the earth. Thus it would seem, from the legend, that 

 Prometheus, like Maui, only recovered the fire which had dis- 

 appeared from the world. Again, Prometheus brought the 

 sacred fire back to men " at the end of a ferula,'" a phrase 

 almost certainly meaning the end of the pointed rubbing- 



* cf. Tongan mofuike, "earthquake," with Mafuie, "the fire-goddess." 

 t " Polynesian Paces," vol. i., p. (>. I, however, think // is equivalent 



to Maori rvri, " angry," the Marqucsans dropping the r, but not /, ; ii, then, 



is not iki. 



I " Juventus Mundi," by the Bight Hon. W. E. Gladstone, p. 208. 



