April 



1888.] 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



135 



What the great master of mathematical astronomy thus 

 advanced with caution, and even with mistrust, is by the 

 less informed in our-time urged with confidence amounting 

 to daring. " Fools rush in " — " the proverb is something 

 musty." 



The theory of the meteoric origin of the universe is 

 interesting and attractive, if not in some aspects imposing 

 and almost awful. It has been so long before the scientific 

 world that Mr. Lockyer's manner of advancing it as a new 

 cosmogony must be regarded as awfully imposing in 

 another sense. We may, however, regard Mr. Lockyer's 

 adoption of the theoiy (like his former absorption of 

 Professor Clarke's fine theory of the probably compound 

 nature of the so-ailled elements) as indicating the approach- 

 ing acceptance of the theory by the public at large as well 

 as by the students of science. 



THE AMERICAN TROTTING-HORSE. 



IIOFESSOR WILLIAM H. BREWER, in a 

 paper on the " Evolution of the American 

 Trotting-Horse," shows that the trotter is an 

 American product, and that it is still in pro- 

 cess of evolution. He gives a column of figures 

 to .show the speed that has been attained in 

 this new form of motion, from a speed of three 

 minutes in 1818 down to two minutes ten and a quarter 

 seconds in 1881. The materials for a curve are offered 

 to mathematicians, and Professor Francis E. Nipher 

 ("American Journal of Science and Arts," vol. xxvi., 

 p. 378), in a mathematical article on the subject, shows that 

 a definite time of ninety-one seconds will ultimately be 

 attained by the American trotter 1 Mr. W. H. Pickering 

 ("St. Louis Academy of Sciences," May 7, 1883; also 

 " American Journal of Science and Arts," vol. xxvi., 

 p. 20), however, urges some objections to the deductions of 

 Professor Nipher. — Popular Science Monthly. 



OYSTER PROTECTION. 



HE great problem of food-supply has led to 

 legislative enactments for the purposes of 

 regulating the trapping and netting of game 

 and fish. State and Government gi-ants 

 have been made for fish commissions ; but, 

 unless the public are clearly educated in the 

 rudiments of zoological science and the prin- 

 ciples of natural selection, appropriations will come tardily 

 and in limited amounts. Dr. W. K. Brooks, in his report 

 to the State of Maryland as one of the oyster commissioners, 

 after showing the absurd way in which the problem of oj'ster- 

 protection has been dealt with, and strenuously urging the 

 necessity of ovster-culture, calls attention to the fact that 

 " civilised races have long recognised the fact that the true 

 remedy is not to limit the demand, but rather to increase 

 the supply of food, bv rearing domestic sheep and cattle and 

 poultry in place of wild deer and buffaloes and turkeys, and 

 by cultivating the scround instead of searching for natural 

 fruits and seeds of the forests and swamps." Mr. Ernest 

 Ingersoll, author of the " Report on the Oyster Industry," 

 tenth United States census, ha-s, in an address before the 

 Geographical Society of New York, a striking sketch of the 

 effect of the white man on the wild animals of Xorth America, 

 showing that, had the Indians remained in possession, little 

 if any change would have taken place. The Indian, like the 



predaceous animals, hunts only for food, and shows even in 

 this habit a wholesome self-restraint, never killing wantonly. 

 He called attention to the survival of a number of small 

 birds about the dwellings of man as the result of favourable 

 conditions, such as a constant supply of food, &c. He shows 

 that the contact of man in the main has been disastrous. 

 His remarks on the oyster are timely ; he shows its 

 extermination along the coast by man's agency. " Hardly 

 more than a century has elapsed since men believed that the 

 oyster-beds of New York were inexhaustible, and that a 

 small measure of legal protection, feebly maintained, was 

 quite enough to sustain them against any chance of decay. 

 So they thought in Mass;\chusetts, where the oysters have 

 not only disappeared but have been forgotten. So they 

 think now in Maryland and Virginia, where their fond 

 expectations are destined to equal downfall." — Professor 

 E. S. Morse, in the Popular Science Monthly. 



THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE MAORI.* 



.\(JRI means " native, but the ilaori ai'e 

 not the aboriginal dwellers in New Zealand. 

 As nftir as the traditions* which recount 

 the generations of chiefs enable us to reckon, 

 between four and five centuries have elapsed 

 since the immigration from Hawaiki, by 

 which Meinicke says is meant the mythical 

 Lvnd of origin of the whole Polynesian I'ace, 

 and not any particular island, although the affinities of the 

 Maori language point to Raratonga. These traditions agree 

 as to the discover}' of New Zealand by Kupe, a native of 

 Hawaiki, who formed an expedition of thu-teen canoes and 

 ventured across the ocean, and to those canoes the several 

 tribal divisions appear to correspond. 



The Malaj'o-Polynesian origin of the Maori is beyond 

 question, the differences now existing between them and 

 kindred races of the Pacific being due to intermingling with 

 the aborigines, who were of the lower Papuan type, and 

 markedly inferior both in bodUy and mental capacity to 

 their conqueroi-s. These have in their turn, not without a 

 fierce struggle, succumbed to the British arms : their decay 

 set in fifty years ago, and their ultimate extinction is only 

 a question of time, so that the task which !Mr. White, 

 following in the wake of Sir George Grey, Taylor, Buller, 

 Bastian, and others, has set himself in collecting traditions 

 of no small value, however adulterated and fragmentary as 

 some of them may be, will secure him the gratitude of 

 anthropologists. His boo't is for students, and they alone 

 Rin rightly assess the worth of his labours, but the material 

 gathered will filter through them to the general reader, to 

 whom meanwhile some ide,a of the contents of this volume 

 may be acceptable. The task undertaken in it and in the 

 volumes which are to follow is " no less than to give the 

 Maori traditions of his i-ace as they relate to the creation of 

 the world, the origin of its animal and vegetable life, the 

 ancient wars in the home of his ancestors, the migi-ations 

 and perils and arrivals of the several canoes in New 

 Zealand, the people they found here, and the ten-itory they 

 respectively occupied ; the names given to the mountains, 

 rivers, headlands, and their meaning ; the tales of folk-lore, 

 of fairies, ghosts, and spirits, of the monsters of the earth 

 and sky ; his traditions relating to the art of tattooing, and 

 the ceremonies connected with births, marriages, deaths, 



» " The Ancient History of the Maori." Vol. I. : Taki-Tnmu 

 Migration. By John White. (Wellington : Government Press ; 

 London : Colonial Booksellers' Agency.) 



