White. — On the Neio Zealand Dog. 597 



The natives of the Polynesian Island Nine are of the fair 

 Polynesian race, possibly without the admixture of Negrito 

 blood, and akin to the Moriori of the Chathams. Their home 

 is situated about two hundred miles to the east of Tonga, and 

 nearly three hundred miles south of Samoa. It is about forty 

 miles in circumference. These people had neither the dog 

 nor the pig ; whether wuthout rats and lizards I cannot state. 

 They would seem to have had no proper name for our term 

 ''animal," for in a translation of the Bible by the Eev. Frank 

 Lawes the word "animal" is rendered "four-honed bird." 

 They, of course, speak a dialect of the Maori language : E 

 manu huifa," four-footed beast " ; e mami lele, " a bird " — i.e., 

 a flying bird or animal. Mann 1 take to have been bird 

 formerly," but that after the introduction of animals to the 

 island the addition of lele, " ^ying" = Maori, rere, " to fly or 

 run," was used as a specific distinction. Hui-fa, literally 

 "bone-four" (four-footed), which seemingly corresponds to 

 Maori uiolia, " the female " (of brutes only). Mr. Tregear, in 

 his paper " Had the Polynesians a Knowledge of Cattle?"! 

 treats the Maori uwha thus : " U, ' the female breast ' ; 

 wha, ' four ' : Can this mean an animal having four teats, 

 as the cow? " We seem to get the original form of Maori 20 

 in U2vha, from Nine, hid, " a bone." Whether a good 

 philologist could, by a study of the word onanu, "a bird," 

 prove that the old-time Polynesian lived in a land where 

 no land-mammals existed I know not, but this would seem 

 worth the looking-up. In Nine, mamc huifa he vao, "beasts 

 of the field " ; e tau tnanu huifa oti kua mea, " all the 

 four-footed beasts that are clean." The Maori kuri and 

 hararehe are taken as equivalent to "beast"; yet these 

 words, before the advent of Europeans, meant "dog." In 

 Tahitian a goat is puaa-niho, literally "the pig with teeth" 

 (on top of his head) — i.e., the horned animal. This study, 

 you see, would be very interesting if well followed up. 



You will notice I have stated two issues — (1.) Had the 

 Moriori, or first inhabitants of New Zealand, a dog (feral or 

 domesticated) and the moa previous to the arrival of the Maori 

 or mixed Polynesian and Melanesian race, bringing the kuri 

 with them? (2.) Or were the original inhabitants of New Zea- 

 land (the backbone of a sunken continent) totally unacquainted 

 with any laud-animal other than varieties of the lizard, and 

 birds? I will now give you part of a letter written by a 

 gentleman whom I some time ago asked to procure me 

 skulls of the Maori dog for examination, but whose name I at 

 present withhold from publication: "While digging lately I 



* Maori, manu, a bird. 



t Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. xxi., p. 447. 



