486 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



practice, was handsomely paid for his work. The marks on 

 the face are called moko, and the operation ta moko. As 

 Dr. Shortland tells us in his book, " New Zealand," it is not 

 intended as a mark to distinguish different tribes, or to denote 

 rank, but only to indicate arrival at man's estate, and 

 a fashionable adornment by which the young men seek to 

 gain the good graces of the young women. It only so far 

 denotes rank as showing that the possessor of a handsome 

 7noko must have had the wherewithal to well remunerate the 

 artist. He says: "As a general rule, two fully-marked 

 faces {moko-im) selected at hazard from different parts of 

 the country would, on comparison, manifest merely some 

 slight dissimilarities attributable to the difference of skill or 

 taste of the artists who had executed the work. The opera- 

 tion is performed with a very small chisel, and, being extremely 

 painful, can only be done bit by bit, according as the patient 

 has courage to endure it." 



The women have usually merely the lines on the lips and 

 a scroll depending from the angles of the mouth. 



The process of ta moko is described differently by different 

 authors. The Eev. E. Taylor describes it in " Te Ika a Maui," 

 at page 320. A somewhat different description of it is 

 given by Eutherford, who, with other white men, his com- 

 panions, underwent the operation about the year 1825. He 

 thus describes it : " The whole of the natives having then 

 seated themselves on the ground in a ring, we were brought 

 into the middle, and, being stripped of our clothes and laid on 

 our backs, we were each of us held down by five or six men, 

 while two others commenced the operation of tattooing us. 

 Having taken a piece of charcoal, and rubbed it upon a stone 

 with a little water until they had produced a thickish liquid, 

 they then dipped into it an instrument made of bone, having 

 a sharp edge like a chisel, and shaped in the fashion of a 

 garden hoe, and immediately applied it to the skin, striking it 

 twice or thrice with a small piece of wood. This made it cut 

 into the flesh as a knife would have done, and caused a great 

 deal of blood to flow, which they kept wiping off with the side 

 of the hand, in order to see if the impression was sufficiently 

 clear. "When it was not, they applied the bone a second time 

 to the same place. They employed, however, various instru- 

 ments in the course of the operation ; one which they some- 

 times used being made of a shark's tooth, and another having 

 teeth like a saw. They had them also of different sizes to 

 suit the different parts of the work. While I was undergoing 

 this operation, although the pain was most acute, I never 

 either moved or uttered a sound, but my comrades moaned 

 dreadfully. Although the operators were very quick and 

 dexterous I was four hours under then- hands, and during the 



