366 REPORT- 1891. 



Sometimes thou didst seek out 

 Fugitives perishing in rocks and caves. 

 Perchance one said to thee, 

 " Be mine, be mine for ever; 

 For my love to thee is great." 



Happy the parent of such a child ! 



Alas for Enuataurere ! Alas for Euuataurere ! 



Thou wert lovely as a fairy ! 

 A husband for Enuataurere ! 



Each envious youth exclaims, 

 " Would that she were mine ! " 



Enuataurere now trips o'er the ruddy oceau. 

 Thy path is the foaming crest of the billow. 



Weep for Enuataurere— 

 For Enuataurere. 



The most interesting stanza is the hist but one— 

 Enuataurere now trips o'er the ruddy oceau. 

 Thy path is the foaming crest of the billow. 



The spirit of the girl is beheved to follow the sun, tripping 

 lightly over the crest of the billows, and sinking with the sun 

 into the underworld (Avaiki), the home of disembodied spirits. 



5. Notes on "Maori Literature.'' 

 By the Eev. James W. Stack, Christchurch. 



The Maoris of New Zealand had no literature in the ordinary 

 acceptation of the word, the art of writing being unknown till it 

 was introduced by the missionaries about the year 1820. It 

 was by the advice of Professor Lee, of Cambridge, that Eoman 

 letters were employed to represent the sounds of the language, 

 and a phonetic system of spelling adopted in forming the 

 words. 



Notwithstanding that the language was unwritten, the 

 Maoris were found to possess a vast amount of knowledge on 

 a variety of subjects, which they had preserved and handed 

 down from generation to generation by oral tradition. The 

 possibility of their being able to transmit knowledge in such a 

 way is placed beyond all doubt by what we know of the Druids, 

 who possessed no literature, and yet attained to a high state of 

 mental culture, through knowledge orally transmitted. We 

 are told that even at the present day many Asiatic nations who 

 possess alphabets from olden time nevertheless still transmit 

 their history by oral tradition. And the story of tlie greatest 

 epic in the world shows how perfectly long poems of the most 

 complex metrical structure may be transmitted by oral tradi- 

 tion for centuries. There is no reason, therefore, to discredit 

 the claim put forward on behalf of Maori traditions to be recog- 



