6 Transactions. — Zoology. 



tribe called Waitaha crossing Cook Strait from the north. 

 Little is known of these Waitaha, but they are supposed to 

 have come originally from the Bay of Plenty, and to have 

 made their way south through the centre of the North 

 Island. They are said to have spread themselves over the 

 whole of the South Island, peopling it densely. This 

 migration is held to have occurred in the latter half 

 of the fifteenth century, but all such dates are of course 

 most uncertain. The Waitaha held undisturbed possession 

 of the land for at least a hundred years, when, about 

 1577, another band of invaders crossed Cook Strait, and 

 soon conquered and destroyed or enslaved the peaceful 

 Waitaha. These invaders, the Ngatimamoe, were an offshoot 

 of the Ngatikahungunu, a powerful East Coast tribe, whose 

 descendants still occupy the whole of the eastern half of the 

 North Island to the south of Poverty Bay. After another 

 more or less peaceful hundred years, the Ngatimamoe were, in 

 their turn, called upon to defend themselves from the Ngai- 

 tahu, a second ofl'ehoot of this same Ngatikahungunu Tribe. 

 The history of the Waitaha conquest was repeated, and 

 the Ngatimamoe were absorbed by their more powerful rela- 

 tions. Still another invasion took place in 1827, when the 

 Ngatitoa, a tribe from the west coast of the North Island, 

 under Te Eauparaha, harried the settlements of the South 

 Island Natives. But this was a mere raid, and did not result 

 in settlement. The Ngaitahu still remain as the dominant 

 tribe, and have given their name to the descendants of the 

 conquered Ngatimamoe. The present Maoris in Otago and 

 Canterbury are, then, though called Ngaitahu, the result of the 

 fusion of that tribe with the Ngatimamoe. But these tribes, 

 though hostile, were not distinct. They were really only 

 sub-tribes given off at different times from the parent Ngatika- 

 Imngunu stock. I describe forty-five skulls which belong to 

 one or other of these two subdivisions. Their measiu'ements 

 are given in Table I. In Table II. are given the measure- 

 ments of thirty-eight skulls from different parts of the North 

 Island, a series obviously too small to be of any use alone 

 towards answering either of the questions mentioned 

 above. I include them in the present pajper, however, from 

 their bearing on the general type of the race, and also because 

 they can be made use of to some extent when taken with 

 those described by others. I hope that some day I may be iu 

 a position to make this North Island table more complete. In 

 the meantime I divide the skulls into three groups, according 

 to the districts where they were found. The first includes 

 skulls from the East Coast, between Poverty Bay and the 

 Wairarapa, the country of the Ngatikahungunu. In this 

 grouj) there are fifteen skulls, fourteen of which are adult. 



