338 Essays. 
The present native inhabitants of New Zealand are evidently, to a certain 
extent, a mixed race containing two elements, one of which may be called 
the pure Indian, the other being the Papuan. The marked characteristics 
of the former are a brown. or copper-coloured skin, black hair, sometimes 
sandy (called by them hurukehu), straight, wavy, or curling, and a tolerably 
well-formed nose, sometimes even aquiline ; while those in whom the Papuan 
element is most marked have the skin much darker, the hair black and crisp 
(but not growing in separate tufts like that of the true blooded Papuans), 
the nose flat and broad at the nostrils, and the lips more full and prominent. 
Between these extremes, every intermediate variety of feature may be met 
with among the New Zealanders ; but their prevailing type of feature is the 
: Indian 
To account for this mixture some persons have suggested that a Papuan 
race was found in possession of the country by the ancestors of the New 
Zealanders when they first arrived, and that the mixed breed had sprung 
from alliances between the two races. It has even been stated that the 
Papuan element belongs more especially to slaves, who are supposed to 
have sprung principally from the subdued and degraded race. Such state- 
ments, however, have no trustworthy foundation; for the crisp hair prevails 
equally among the rangatira, or gentleman class, and among slaves. Besides, 
the traditions of the New Zealanders speak [of the country as being unin- 
habited on the arrival of their canoes from Hawaiki; and in the other islands 
of Polynesia there exist similar indications of a mixed race. 
These traces of a mixed race are easily accounted for by supposing, as 
indeed appears certain, that the Indian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula 
were primitively inhabited by Papuans, and that the brown or copper- 
coloured race, whom we have called Indian, invaded their country and took 
possession of parts of it; for a long time must have elapsed between their 
first invasion of the Malay Peninsula and their conquest of the Philippine 
Islands, from which points we suppose the ancestors of the Polynesians to 
have migrated. And during the interval, in which the two races remained so © 
nearly in contact, while the one was being supplanted or absorbed by the 
other, alliances must have taken place between individuals of opposite sexes, 
giving rise to the appearance of a mixed race now observable. 
