368 REPORT— 1891. 



the tribal or national gatherings the various traditions of the 

 people. This practice, while it helped to diffuse the knowledge 

 which the learned possessed, gave them an opportunity of com- 

 paring notes with one another, and lessened the risk of any 

 serious departure from the received traditions of the race. 



To Europeans whose memories have not been exercised and 

 trained to the same extent that the Maoris' memories were, it 

 seems almost impossible to believe that so large an amount 

 of knowledge on such a variety of subjects as they possessed 

 could have been preserved for any length of time by oral tradi- 

 tion. But we have evidence of the exceptional powers of 

 memory possessed by the Maoris, furnished by some of the 

 earliest travellers in this country, one of whom states that he 

 was accompanied on one occasion by a young chief on a visit to 

 a distant tribe. While there the young Maori heard for the first 

 time a poem of about fifty lines, which he correctly recited on 

 his return for the amusement of his friends. I have often been 

 twitted myself by Maori chiefs for consulting books of refer- 

 ence, "You white men," they said, " keep your knowledge on 

 your book-shelves ; we keep it all in our memories." 



On comparing the traditions of the Maoris of New Zealand 

 with the traditions of other branches of their race scattered 

 over the Pacific, from all intercourse with whom they have been 

 cut off for many centuries, it is very satisfactory to. find that 

 they are substantially the same. (Vide Appendix.) 



These facts encourage the students of Maori traditions to 

 prosecute their investigations with a full persuasion that they 

 contain much that is of considerable antiquity, in spite of their 

 having so recently been collected into their present form. 



What Professor Max Miiller thinks of these Polynesian 

 traditions we learn from the preface to the Eev. Wyatt Gill's 

 " Myths and Songs of the South Pacific," where he says, " Now, 

 what are these myths and songs but antiquities, preserved for 

 hundreds — it may be for thousands of years, showing us far 

 better than any stone weapons or stone idols the growth ofhe 

 human mind during a period which is as yet full of the most 

 perplexing problems to the psychologist, the historian, and the 

 theologian ! They contain much that will deeply interest all 

 those who have learned to sympathize with the childhood of 

 the world, and have not forgotten that the child is the father 

 of the man ; much that will startle those who think that meta- 

 physical conceptions are incompatible with downright savagery ; 

 much also that will comfort those who hold that God has not 

 left Himself without a witness even amongst the lowest out- 

 casts of the human race." 



The language spoken by the New-Zealanders is a dialect of 

 the language spoken by the various branches of the Maori race 

 scattered over the Pacific from the Sandwich Islands in the 



