a. 
: 
Nov. 10, 1881] 
show plain traces of descent from ancestors who in some 
way shared the higher culture of Asiatic nations. At 
“Wellington Prof. Bastian found Mr. John White, who, as 
a skilled translator of Maori, worked for Sir George Grey 
in bringing out the “ Polynesian Mythology,” and has 
been engaged in the study of native lore ever since. He 
is about to publish the results of his long study with the 
aid of the Colonial Government, and we have here as a 
specimen one of those mystic Maori cosmogonies which 
make us fancy we are hearing some Buddhist or Gnostic 
philosopher pour out his dreamy metaphysics about the 
origin of things. Out of the Primal Night, says the Maori 
poet, there divided itself Nothing, then came Darkness, 
then Seeking, and Following, and then such stages as 
Conception of Thought, Spirit Life, Desire, Coming 
into Form, Breath of Life, Space. All this is of a piece 
with the native Polynesian poetry in Taylor’s “ New Zea- 
land,” and that lately published by Judge Fornander in 
Hawaii. The poem that begins with the time when there 
was no voice nor sound, no day nor night, may remind 
us of the famous hymn of the Rig Veda that begins “ Nor 
aught nor naught existed.” We find here the well-known 
chant of Taaroa, how in the emptiness of space, when 
‘there was no earth nor sky nor sea, Taaroa passing into 
new forms became the foundation of the rocks and the 
sand of the sea, and the land of Hawaii was born as his 
shell. Prof. Bastian well compares this with the Scan- 
dinavian poem in the Edda, how there was no sand nor 
sea nor salt waves, no earth nor sky above, till Bér’s 
sons made the mighty Midgard—earth. He points out, 
as he has already done, the curious likeness between 
the Scandinavian story of the fishing up of the mon- 
strous Midgard-snake, and the South Sea Island tale of 
Maui fishing up the island of New Zealand. Not less 
striking is such an analogy as the Polynesian Taaroa 
mating with his own energy in female form, like a Hindu 
god with his Sakti. The author may well ask, are these 
people, with such far echoes of Orphic, Chaldean, Bud- 
dhist philosophy, the simple playful children of nature on 
_whom we look down as representing the lowest rungs in 
the ladder of development? In Hawaii the German an- 
thropologist learnt much from King Kalakaua, who is 
thoroughly initiated in the religious ideas of his royal 
predecessors, who used to have the eyes of their enemies 
offered them by the high priest in the stone bowl 
which his majesty still keeps as a curiosity. Out 
of the royal library he produced a MS. temple-chant, 
written about the beginning of this century, containing a 
cosmogony, of which Prof. Bastian reproduces as much 
as he had time to have translated. It has real poetry in 
it, and as a piece of child-like philosophy it is not without 
interest in its enumeration of the orders of beings, the 
grubs and worms, the sea-eggs and mussels, the seaweed 
in the ocean watched by the grass on land, the cranes 
and the gulls at sea watched by the-hawks on land, and so 
on with trees and other creatures, till at last the gods 
come into being, and man rises out of the night. For a 
specimen of barbaric science may be mentioned the Maori 
myth told to the author by Mr. Davis, how the Moon 
arose out of the ocean, and still keeps the traces of this 
marine origin in its phases, which follow the ebb and flow 
of the tide. 
EDWARD B, TYLOR 
NATURE ab 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 
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of communications containing interesting and nevel facts. | 
The Struggle of Parts in the Organism 
ALTHOUGH I agree with the Duke of Argyll that the pages of 
NATURE are not adapted to a discussion on the general question 
of Theism, the letters which you this week publish leave me no 
alternative but that of entering upon the subject, so far at 
least as it seems desirable that I should now express my ind:- 
vidual opinion on the points which your correspondents have 
raised, 
My statement of what I conceive to be the position of the 
matter may best be rendered by answering first the questions 
which are put to me by Dr. Carpenter. He desires me to 
explain the ‘‘ precise sense” which I attach to the phrase, “‘a 
general law whose operation is presumably competent to produce 
any set of phenomena,” and proceeds in a most terse and lucid 
manner to expound the well-known and unquestionable truth 
that ‘in the purely scientific sense a ‘law of nature’ is nothing 
more than a general expression of a certain set of uniformities 
which the intellect of man discerns in the surrounding universe,” 
&c. This is the only sense in which I have intended to use the 
term, and if my meaning has been obscured by speaking of a 
general law ‘‘ producing” any set of phenomena, it is only 
becau:e the idea of ‘‘a law of nature” as ‘‘any kind of coercive 
agency,” or indeed anything other than ‘‘a generalised expression 
of facts,” was so far from my mind that I perhaps too readily 
employed a convenient, though metaphorical, ! mode of expression 
—just as one speaks of the sun rising, &c. In speaking then of 
Natural Selection as ‘‘ competent to produce” certain phenomena 
I only meant that, given a certain set of activities and conditions 
supposed to be uniform, and the phenomena in question would 
occur, whether or not these activities and conditions are taken 
to be due toa disposing mind. So far, therefore, am I from 
maintaining ‘that there is anything in the /aw of Natural Selec- 
tion that places it in a different category from every other,” that 
my whole contention is exactly the reverse—namely, that the law 
of natural selection stands to certain observed phenomena of 
biology in just the same logical relation as, for instance, the law 
of gravitation stands to certain observed phenomena of astronomy. 
Indeed, it is just because I hold the laws of evolution to be so 
precisely identical in logical s¢aéws with all other so-called laws 
of nature, that 1 see no better evidence of Design in ‘‘the 
adapted structures” of ‘“‘the Human Hand” than I do in the 
adaptation, say, of a river to the bed which it has itself been the 
means of excavating.2 In both cases I believe that ; hysical 
causes have been at work (whether or not there have been meta- 
physical causes of a mental nature behind them), w ith the 
difference only that the one set are more complex and less 
obvious than the other. But in each case alike, if the physical 
causes are deemed adequate to furnish a scientific explanation 
of the effects, there is no residual effect to be carried over for 
explanation by any metaphysical theory of Design. Design, of 
course, there may be in both cases ; I only maintain that if the 
laws of evolution are conceded to stand to the structure of an 
organism in the same logical relation as certain other natural 
laws stand to the structure of a river’s bed, then, ex /Ayfothes?, 
the one set of adaptations constitutes no evidence of Design 
different in kind from that furnished by the other. 
This appears to be the point where my opinion has had the 
misfortune to be found at variance with that of the Duke of 
Argyll. For in his last letter he says that ‘‘there are in nature 
a few [? many, vide infra] cases of apparent adaptations and of 
t 7¢. “metaphorical” as investing a natural ‘‘law”’ with the significa- 
tion of a natural “‘cause.’’ A law of nature I take to mean a general pro- 
position or formula which expresses the observed operation of certain physical 
causes, whether or not these are known. Therefore, although it is, strictly 
speaking, incorrect to say that “‘natural selection is a law competent to 
produce adaptations,” in using such a form of expression one may be under- 
stood to mean ‘‘the sundry physical causes, whose joint operation is formu- 
lated by the law of natural selection, are competent to produce,” &c. 
2 This illustration is borrowed from Mr. Wallace, who, in his “‘ Natural 
Selection,” elaborates it very instructively. 
