8 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



where abundant, furnishing their ordinary dress. Though the 

 New-Zealanders surpassed their Polynesian relatives in the 

 manufacture of textile fabrics, all their garments were hand- 

 plaited, the loom and spinning-wheel, or even the distaff, bemg 

 unknown. Besides these hand-plaited garments, cloaks worn 

 only by persons of rank were made from the skins of dogs, the 

 only domestic animal they possessed. When to these dress- 

 stuffs are added bark cloth, the principal clothing material 

 throughout Polynesia, and cinctures of leaves,* frequently the 

 only covering worn by females, it will be seen that, though no 

 section of the Maori race went habitually naked, their clothes 

 were of the most primitive descriptions. They were, however, 

 far in advance of the Australian aborigines and the Papuans, 

 with whom they were mixed, few of these people wearing any 

 clothing whatsoever, even their ornaments being scarce and 

 extremely rude. 



II. — The Cultivated Plants of Polynesia : Fokeign 

 Species. 



The great chain of islands that extends eastward from 

 Sumatra along the equator as far as the Marquesas Group 

 forms a zone of vegetation unparalleled in any other portion of 

 the globe, the same climatic conditions prevailing throughout 

 its whole length — more than eight thousand miles, or one- 

 third of the earth's circumference. Excepting a few alpine 

 forms, there is probably no species of plant found on any one 

 portion of the line that would not grow on all other portions 

 where it could find suitable soil wherein to fix its roots. 



Here, then, those agencies by which plants are dissemi- 

 nated over the earth (man included) have had a wide, unbroken 

 field of operation, and in the varied distribution of the species 

 throughout the region their effects are now visible. 



On examining this distribution we find that amongst the 

 most widely distributed are the cultivated plants ; but to this 

 rule there are some marked exceptions, showing that the 

 action of man as a distributing agency has been irregular or 

 interrupted. Generally the stream of vegetation has been 

 from west to east, though in a few instances the reverse is 

 observable ; but wherever cultivated plants of foreign origin 

 are found history can be accurately determined — with one or 

 two exceptions, they seem invariably to have entered at the 

 western end of the chain. In the cultivated plants of the 

 Polynesian islands, which form the eastern extremity of the 

 great chain, we have a means of determining this easterly 

 movement, or, in other words, the interchange of productions 

 that has taken place between the inhabitants of the various 



* " Polynesian Researches," by W. Ellis. 



