CorrNso.—On the Maori Races of New Zealand. . 899 
sea, and, in some few cases, of their having been killed by some renowned hero 
of former days. Now in most of these instances alluded to (some of which 
places the writer has seen and examined), a thousand years would scarcely 
suffice for their subsequent forests and depth of vegetable humus. Again, 
the stone canoes in which those mythical emigrants arrived, scattered on both 
the East and West Coast, one being on the crest of a high range, twenty 
miles from the sea; the footmarks of Rongokako, one of those emigrants, 
also left in stone at various parts of the East Coast; the several men 
metamorphosed into large perpendicular stones at Manaia, in Whangarei 
Harbour, &c., &c., all indicate a long time back in the old night preceding all 
history, or such conspicuous stones would not have been handed down and 
narrated by such a shrewd inquisitive race as the New Zealanders. Lastly, 
the tradition which the writer received in 1837 , from an intelligent aged 
" priest" in the Bay of Plenty, respecting Tuhua, or Mayor Island, there, viz. 
that anciently the northern natives obtained their prized greenstone from 
that island; but that the guardian god being vexed, covered it with excre- 
mentitious substances, and swam away with the fish which produced it to the 
South Island, whence subsequently all the greenstone was with difficulty 
obtained. Now, as the island is an eruptive volcanic mass, this tradition, in 
more ways than one, points to a time long since past. Often what is not 
scientifically correct has in it a deep and pregnant truth of feeling. 
(2.) Archeology.—In repeated travelling in the North Island, from Cook 
Strait to Cape Maria van Diemen, during more than a quarter of a century, 
and that by by-paths long disused, through forests and over mountain and 
hilly ranges, the writer has been often astonished at the signs frequently 
met with of a very numerous ancient population, who once dwelt in places 
long since desolate and uninhabited: such as the number and extent of 
their hill forts, cut, levelled, escarped, moated, and fenced only with immense 
labour, considering they had no iron tools and the number and extent of 
their ancient eultivations, all long since overgrown; and the enormous 
mounds of river, lake, and sea-shells, sometimes clearly revealing the slow 
accretions through years or centuries, by their accumulations having been 
made stratum super stratum with intervening layers of vegetable mould and 
humus, each stratum of shell possessing small fragments of obsidian, which 
mineral (used by them for cutting their hair and themselves in lamentation, 
and also for scraping their finer woodwork), being only found in one or two 
districts, had been brought from a great distance. He also noticed, and that 
-in more than one or two places, that some of the ancient New Zealanders 
buried their dead in the earth or sand; skulls having been met with and 
skeletons which had been buried, and from which the winds had removed the 
soil. On inquiry it was found that none of the present generation knew 
