THE MAORI’S PLACE IN HISTORY. 275 
me; and how a people, having comparatively speaking but 
little necessity to use calculation and being destitute of 
knowledge of figures, should have originated and matured 
such a system is still wonderful, and appears, more than any 
other fact, to favour the opinion that these islands were 
peopled from a country whose inhabitants were highly 
elvilized.” 
We are wont to regard the old Chaldean and Egyptian 
priests as the “Fathers of Astronomy,” but judging by the 
Phoenicians, and Greeks, who inherited their knowledge, it 
was of little use to the navigator or geographer. The 
Phoenicians, who were the great mariners of our classical 
times, in their voyages dared not lose sight of land, and 
years after they had cireumnavigated the African continent 
by creeping round the coast, their statement that during a 
part of the voyage, while steering west, they had the sun 
on their right hand, was considered an impossibility by 
learned Athenians. With all their philosophy the Greeks 
had only a very vague idea regarding the portion of the 
world known to them. According to Herodotus the Danube 
rose in the Pyrenees, and even Strabo was unable to 
determine the direction of the Alps. If the Polynesian 
navigators had not some means of arriving at a more 
intelligent knowledge of the region they inhabited, the great 
ocean on which they ventured forth must have been their 
grave. It is not to shepherds guarding their flocks by night 
we must turn for the origin of astronomy, but to fishermen 
labouring for their subsistence on the perilous deep. Again 
and again, when overtaken by darkness, the stars would be 
beacons guiding them to their homes. Long before the 
spangled vault awakened their curiosity or imagination the 
instinct of self-preservation would have stamped on their 
memory the relative positions of certain stars and the land 
they inhabited. Thus the association in various religions of 
the priest, the fisherman, and the astronomer may be 
accounted for. The Malay Archipelago, with the countless 
islands spread out within the tropics, was above all other 
portions of the globe calculated to call into existence a 
seafarnmg people and the twin sciences astronomy and 
navigation, the islands sometimes close, sometimes far 
apart, the regular periodical trade-winds, the zone of equal 
days and nights, the sun vertical twice annually to every 
place within the archipelago, the Pole Star on the one 
side and the Southern Cross on the other, with the rismg 
