Corzxso.—On the Maori Races of New Zealand. 349 
few cases, a person not “sacred” might act, yet he sometimes most incon- 
veniently became “sacred” by his doing so! Asa rule, a “ sacred " person 
never touched common work or things. Their common matters, however, 
were open to all, with this only reservation, —that men's work was not done 
by women, and vice versé. 
18. Their better architecture and building,—bearing in mind the non- 
durability of the materials used,—though peculiar, was of first order, and 
well fitted for the people and the climate. Their houses, partieularly those 
of the principal chiefs, were strongly and neatly built, snug, and often highly 
ornamented. They were cool in summer and warm in winter. The faults 
of all their houses were, their being too low, with excessively low doors, 
with earthern floors, and without chimney or sufficient ventilation. In 
shape they were generally a parallelogram, with their walls always slightly 
inclined inwards, with the angle of the roof low, and invariably with the one 
door and one window at the sunny end, within a pretty large veranda. In 
size they were from one which would contain with ease a hundred men, to 
one which would only contain six. The floors were rarely ever raised above, 
oftener sunk into, the ground. The, window shutter and door, each fixed in 
a substantial and often highly carved wooden frame, slid to and fro, and 
when closed all was dark within. The house having its framework wholly 
of totara wood (of which the pilasters were often each two feet wide, and 
smoothed by repeated chipping with a stone adze), was built of several coats 
of bulrushes, securely fixed with flax, having a handsome ornamental lining 
of reeds to the roof and between the wide pilasters, covered outside with 
one or more coats of strong thatch firmly fixed, and often with the bark 
of the fofara pine laid on in large slabs. On the large and wide barge- 
boards, posts, ridgepole, and ends of the veranda, much grotesque 
carving and ornamental work was often displayed; these were mostly 
coloured red. Their sweet-potato stores were also often elaborately 
finished. Sometimes their stores were neatly set on high posts, which 
were not unfrequently carved, and were climbed up into by means of a 
notched pole as a ladder. Their common houses though plain were often 
very strongly made; sometimes, however, their walls were not more than 
two feet high, with a prodigious roof. No observable order was fol. 
lowed in placing their houses in a village; throughout which there 
were ways of communication in all directions, but no proper streets ; 
each sub-tribe or family generally enclosed with an inner fence, having 
around their own houses apertures for ingress and egress. The outer fence 
of the village, often composed of whole timber trees set in the ground, 
without their bark or branches, and from fifteen to twenty or even to thirty 
feet in height, and strongly secured with transverse timbers cross-lashed to 
