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KNOWLEDGE. 



December. 1913. 



in his forehead. Not to be eclipsed by this kind of 

 fame his neighbours, Shungie and Okeda, firmly 

 maintained, against all critics and sceptics, that in 

 them lived the gods of the sea. 



The dwelling-place of the gods — they, like the 

 Maoris, lived largely in community, it would appear 

 — was always represented as being extremely 

 beautiful. " When the clouds are tinted with 

 bright and lively colours," writes Mr. Kendal, a 

 missionary, " the Atua above, it is supposed, is 

 planting sweet potatoes. At the season when 

 these are planted in the ground the planters 

 dress themselves in their best raiment, and say that, 

 as Atuas on earth, they are imitating the Atua in 

 heaven." Captain Cruise, in his journal, is 

 responsible for the statement that the Maoris he met 

 with a hundred years ago believed that the higher 

 orders among them were immortal, but that when 

 the common people died they perished for ever. 

 The spirit, they explained, left the body the third 

 day after death, till which time it hovered near the 

 corpse, hearing quite well all that was said to it. 

 But they held, further — and here again their beliefs 

 become somewhat complicated and contradictory — 

 that there was a separate immortality for each of 

 the eyes of the dead chief. The left ascended to 

 heaven and became a star, and the other, as a spirit, 

 took flight for the Reinga. The Reinga is, nowa- 

 days, sometimes mentioned as the Elysium of the 

 departed, and is also given to the rock on the north 

 shore of New Zealand from which the Maoris 

 believed the spirits leaped into the sea on their way 

 to this Elysium. Little difficulty, apparently, was 

 experienced in passing from the surface of the 

 ocean to the portals of these happy regions. In most 

 mythologies the way to spirit land is usually depicted 

 as being long and painful. Southey, in his " Songs 

 of the American Indians," for example, describes 



the dread path which has to be trod by the Hurons: 



To the country of the dead, 



Long and painful is thy way ! 



O'er rivers wide and deep 



Lies the road that must be passed, 



By bridges narrow-wall'd, 

 When scarce the soul can force its way, 

 While the loose fabric totters under it. 



War remained one of the chief employments in 

 the olden-time Maori heaven, though how results 

 were established in the matter of deaths and 

 victories does not appear. A Wesleyan missionary, 

 in The Missionary Register for 1826, relates a lively 

 conversation which took place between him and 

 several Maoris on the twin subjects of heaven and 

 hell. He says : " On telling them about the two 

 eternal states, as described in the Scriptures, one of 

 the number, an old chief, began to protest against 

 these things with all the vehemence imaginable, and 

 said he assuredly would not go to heaven, nor 

 would he go to hell to have nothing but fire to 

 eat, but he would go to the Raing or Po, to 

 eat kumeras with his friends who had gone 

 before." Slaves were sacrificed on the death of 

 a chief, so that they might accompany his spirit, or 

 spirits. The Missionary Register for 1828 narrates 

 the story of a child having been drowned, when the 

 mother insisted upon a female slave being killed " to 

 be a companion for it on its way to the Reinga." 

 It only remains to add that these old beliefs are not 

 yet wholly extinct in New Zealand. The present- 

 day Maoris will seldom venture far from their homes 

 when the night is dark — spirits are then abroad. 

 Graveyards and the houses of dead chiefs are tapu ; 

 to desecrate them would bring affliction, possibly 

 death. Still, in the silence of night, when the cry 

 of a belated bird is heard out of the darkness, the 

 Maori will exclaim : " Ah ! there goes another spirit 

 to Te Reinga." 



THE LATE ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE. 



As our frontispiece to the volume of " Knowledge " 

 for 1912 we gave a portrait of Sir Joseph Hooker, 

 whom science had recently lost, and who in the year 

 1858, with Sir Charles Lyell, shared the honour of 

 communicating to the Linnean Society the papers 

 relating to the production of varieties, races, and 

 species which contained " the results of the 

 investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr. 

 Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace." 



Hooker died at the age of ninety-four and now we 

 choose as our frontispiece a portrait of Dr. Alfred 

 Russel Wallace, who has just passed away at the 

 age of ninety. The part which Wallace played in 

 the establishment of the theory of natural selection 

 is too well known to need any comment from us, but 

 we may remind our readers of one or two points in 

 his life. He was born at Usk in Monmouthshire, 

 on January 8th, 1823, and was eight years younger 

 than Darwin. He left Hertford Grammar School 

 in 1836, and helped his brother who was an archi- 

 tect and surveyor. In 1840 he began to take an 

 interest in natural history and travel, and while 



he was a master at a school in Leicester he met Mr. 

 H. W. Bates and took up with him the study of 

 beetles. It was with Bates that Wallace started off 

 in 1848 to the Amazons, to gather facts towards 

 solving the problem of the origin of species. 



In 1852 Wallace, who had left Bates a year or so 

 previously, returned to England, losing all his 

 collections owing to his ship being burnt, and spend- 

 ing ten days in an open boat. He remained in 

 England for a year and a half to publish a book on 

 his travels, after which he went to the Malay 

 Archipelago for nearly eight years. In February, 

 1858, while he was in the Moluccas, he got the first 

 idea of the survival of the fittest obtaining as 

 did Darwin a suggestion from Malthus's " Essay 

 on Population." The paper arising out of this, 

 Wallace sent to Darwin. It is well known that 

 with regard to some points Wallace differed from 

 Darwin, and he occupied himself in the later 

 years of his life with other matters than those 

 which are purely scientific, but into these we 

 need not here go. 



