Cotenso.—On the Maori Races of New Zealand. 377 
articles. The many and varied acquirements of the different parts and kinds 
of house building ; of making their many different canoes ; and of all kinds 
of wooden and stone implements for use and defence; of cultivating success- 
fully the soil; of making several kinds of very ingenious traps for catching 
animals; of bird and rat snaring ; and of sea, river, and swamp fishing in all 
its various branches; of carving, tattooing, weaving, spinning, and plaiting ; 
and of making sails and nets of many kinds; of skill in paddling, steering, 
and navigating a canoe ; of swimming, climbing, and parrying spear thrusts ; 
of music, singing, and dancing ; of surgery and oratory; of genealogies and 
relationships ; of old feuds, and their causes, and their unsettled scores ; of 
boundaries, and of roads and tracks to distant places, not to mention all the 
needful acquirements respecting the tapu, traditions, songs, chaunts, exor- 
cisms, and very many customs. In bygone years the writer has not unfre- 
quently looked with quiet admiration at such an individual diligently and 
unassumingly working at his many varied occupations, often, when tired at 
one, dropping it and taking up another; and in doing so he has thought,— 
what an example such an one was of the successful pursuit of knowledge 
under difficulties! How truly he deserved to be called a “ tohunga” (a living 
cyclopedia or skilled man)! At such times the exquisite and not inappli- 
cable lines of Hurdis (learnt in childhood) would rush into the mind, and 
may not be wholly out of place here :— 
* But most of all it wins my admiratio: 
To view the structure of this little cas -— 
à ———Mark it well, within, without, 
No tool had he that wrought, no knife to cut, 
inse 
No glue to join; [his hand alone] was all 
And yet how T finished !—— 
Fondly 
‘We boast of spicae whose noblest skill 
Instinctive genius foils." 
32. It is evident they possessed the germs of knowledge of the first prin- 
ciples of mechanics ; but it appeared more like a decaying remnant of ancient 
wisdom, or a growth nipped in its bud, than a new or recent development. 
They seem scarcely ever to have improved the one original idea. The powers 
of the inclined plane they knew and used in the wedge, and in moving heavy 
weights up a prepared slope. In using the lever they well knew the difference 
between a high or low, near or far-off fulerum. The wheel and axle, rude as 
it was, they had in their quartz-pointed drill or wimble; the screw, in the 
“Spanish tourniquet,” for expressing of oil, &c.; and the pulley in rollers 
for their canoes and for hoisting up heavy weights to their high stages for 
great feasts, which rollers they often smoothed and wetted, or covered with 
wet sea-weed, to make the body to be moved the better to glide. 
48 
