maori art. 477 



Thursday, August 30. 



The rresident, Mr. Alan Carroll, M.A., M.D., in the Chair. 



The President delivered an Address : — "On Movements of Races 

 from Asia to America and Australia " 



Friday, August 31. 

 The President, Mr. Alan Carroll, M.A., M.D., in the Chair. 



The following papers were read : — 



1.— MAORI ART. 

 By Augustus Hamilton, of Napier, New Zealand. 



\Ahstract?^ 



The author said that in New Zealand no branch of ethnographical 

 enquiry exceeded in interest the investigation of the vast amount 

 of skill, time, and labour which must have been expended by the 

 Maori on the art of wood carving and similar decoration ; and 

 that fi'om a careful study and collation of these carvings, he 

 thought it might be possible to locate that land of shade — the 

 " Hawaiki" of the exodus — the land from which long years ago, 

 the seven historical canoes of Maori story came, laden with a 

 warlike race. But caution was needed in drawing any conclusions 

 from supposed coincidences in a decorative pattern or design, for 

 one chai'acteristic form in wooden carved work, known generally 

 as the Greek key pattern — simply a flowing arrangement of the 

 line form — had been common to all nations even from the very 

 dawn of civilisation. A document of the decorative kind, worthy 

 to be examined, was the " Moko," or face-marking, of the Maori 

 Rangatira. Viewed from our point of view a tattooed Maori 

 chief may be called a savage, but that is an injustice to a noble 

 and (until spoiled by contact and association with the outcasts of 

 European sofciety) an industrious race. Pride of lineage and posi- 

 tion, amongst the Maories, covered the face and some parts of the 

 body with an accurate and well executed combination of lines and 

 symbols, partly conventional, partly totemic ; a heraldic blazon 

 high in the scale of abstract art. In the large edition of Cook's 

 " Voyages " there is a sketch, drawn from nature in 1 764, of a style 

 of tattooing which is noted by Cook as " rare," and yet occasional 

 specimens of that same pattern are seen now, after the lapse of 



