CotEnso.—On the Maori Races of New Zealand. 403 
one or two of the sub-dialects to become both commonly used and domi- 
nant); could those tribes also severally set aside their own many peculiar 
words, and adopt words which were strange and new (N.Z.), in such a short 
period? or, rather, did they not gradually do so, through the long lapse of 
ages, and of little intercourse, while they still retained their characteristic 
tribal pronunciation and manner of speaking ? 
(6.) Religion.—It is well known that the Sandwich islanders (Hawaii or 
Hawaiki) had an old and costly idolatrous worship, possessing ancient 
temples and many ceremonies. It almost seems too ridieulous momentarily 
to entertain such a notion as that such a ceremonial worship had only 
originated 400 years before Cook visited them; or, in other words, that it 
sprang up (de novo) after our emigrants to New Zealand had left. Yet both 
these positions the believers in the New Zealand immigration myth, from 
that Hawaiki, must be prepared to support. For certainly, had those emi- 
grants known of it, they could not so easily and entirely have east it off. 
So, again, at Savaii (or Hawaiki) of the Samoan group; their religion was, 
if possible, still farther from anything that either has, or reasonably might 
have, obtained in New Zealand. For there, * every village had its god, and 
its small temple consecrated to the deity of the place." A woman would 
say, on the birth of her child, “I have got a child for so-and-so,” and name 
the village god.* In their village temples, too, were objects for veneration. 
They also daily offered meat-offerings and drink-offerings to their god, and 
this at home in every house. And their many taboos (¢apw)—the sea-pike 
taboo, the white shark taboo, the cross-stick taboo, the ulcer, the tic-doloreux, 
and the death taboo, the rat, and the thunder taboo, &c.—were all differing 
widely from anything which has ever obtained in New Zealand. 
(7.) The Moa, Dinornis.—Its valuable evidence is purposely omitted, as 
the writer still holds to his original opinion, published twenty-three years 
ago,t and drawn both from geological deductions as well as from history, in 
reference to its never having been seen alive by the present race of New 
Zealanders. For if it had been seen by them, and by them had been 
gradually killed and extirpated, as some Europeans have laboured to show, then 
no surer evidence could be desired as to the great antiquity of the present 
race in New Zealand. 
(8) After examining and weighing all this evidence gathered from various 
sources, the mind is irresistibly driven to accept the only logical conclusion, 
that the time of the early or first peopling of New Zealand is one of high 
antiquity. 
* 
* Turner’s “ Nineteen Years in Polynesia," pp. 239, 240. 
t In “Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science," Vol. II. 
