Tbegeae. — Curious Polyneakin Words. 541 



ing in the New Zealo.iul word, exactly akin to the European 

 degradation of the word SLW, glorious (a member of the 

 Slavonic race), into our English sZaue. If the process by which 

 TAUREKAKEKA was thus degraded could be traced, it would 

 doubtless have historical value. 



RAUMATI, summer. The meaning of biati is dry; 

 shrivelled; a dry branch: and, as kau mea,ns leaf, it would 

 be perfectly natural without any great flight of imagination 

 to give, as the derivation of raumati, summer, " the time of 

 shrivelled leaves."''' 



Tlie comparatives, however, suggest caution. We have the 

 Samoan naumati, dry, destitute ofioater : mati, stale, as water 

 that has been kept for some time, or cocoanuts picked some 

 days before. Tahitian, raumati, to cease frovi rain, to hold fair, 

 applied to the weather. Mangarevan, noumati, dryness, sultry, 

 hot. Marquesan, gumati, the sun. The meaning destitute of 

 water, &c., brings us to the Hawaiian laumake, the abating or 

 subsiding of Jcater, i.e., a, drought : lau, the cxj^anse ; the sea, 

 and hence neater (obsolete). So we find that rau is an 

 old Polynesian word meaning water, and that eau-biati 

 means — not the shrivelling of leaves, but— ^/ic drying-uj) of 

 ivater : a lesson to us on hasty etymologies not based on com- 

 parative studies. 



WHAKA-IEO, to carve ; to adorn with carving ; tattooed. 

 I have remarked in former papers that there is a high proba- 

 bility that the Maori or Polynesian people have formerly 

 known a much higher state of civilization than at present, 

 and that evidence to that effect was to be found in the manner 

 in which some of their words are used. Expressions relating 

 to tattooing (forms of ta and tau) also mean to print, to paint 

 or mark on the skin; to make letters, to count, to designate ; " to 

 irrint upon native cloth as in former times;" to put doio)i for 

 remembrance, to reckon descent, genealogy, to give puhlicity, to 

 rehectrse in the hearing of another that he may learn, to appoint 

 boundaries, &c. ; the obvious inference being that the tat- 

 tooing or printing was not for mere ornament, but was at 

 some time an actual writing. Whaka-iro, to carve, is gene- 

 rally applied to ivood-carving, but is, in an obsolete sense, 

 used for tattooing. I will give as an example the line in Sir 

 George Grey's "Polynesian Mythology" referring to the strife 

 between Manaia and Ngatoro-i-rangi, when Ngatoro destroyed 

 the host of his enemies in a storm raised by his incantations. 

 Among the corpses of the drowned the body of Manaia was 



* One author has done this, spelling the word incorrectly (rau-mate), 

 in his usual fashion. The form ho gives — viz., eau, a leaf; mate, dead 

 — would he more suggestive to a European than to one living in New- 

 Zealand, where the native trees do not shed their leaves in summer or 

 autumn (with one exception). 



