50 Transactions.— Miscellaneous. 
Art. V.—On the Ignorance of the Ancient New Zealander of the Use of Projectile 
Weapons. By Coueman Puurs. 
[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 22nd November, 1879.] 
Mr. W. Cotenso, in a paper contributed to the Hawke's Bay Philosophical 
Institute last year, headed as above,* replies at some length to a short paper 
I had the honour of reading before the Wellington Philosophical Society 
during the Session of 1877,+ entitled, “On a peculiar Method of Arrow 
Propulsion as observed amongst the Maoris.” Mr. Colenso’s paper appears 
to me worthy of the greatest consideration, and I readily forgive his some- 
what discourteous allusions to my remarks, seeing that I have been led to 
enquire more fully into a subject of so much interest. I propose in the 
following paper to add to the authorities quoted by Mr. Colenso, and set 
out the further knowledge we possess of the use of the bow and arrow among 
other savage nations. We may thus be able to deduce, from so many 
scattered facts, some ethnological analogy concerning the ** Whence of the 
Maori.” 
I must confess, however, that, in my opinion, far too much importance 
has been attached, by purely local writers, to this question. Had any one 
of these writers travelled among and seen the different sections of the 
Malayan or Papuan races, inhabiting the South Sea Islands, he would not 
have exalted the question of the * Whence of the Maori” into the position 
to which he has exalted it. Mr. Colenso, who fairly enough represents this 
party, takes me severely to task for having ventured to say, in effect, that - 
the Maori was merely one of those sections, and that. his ancestry would be 
found among some of the people inhabiting one of the Pacific groups of 
islands. I imagine that I am justified in making such a statement. Pro- 
fessor Owen, in May last, when reading a paper before the Royal Colonial 
Institute on the extinct animals of the Colonies of Great Britain, } observed :— 
** When the Maori first landed he found no kangaroo or other herbivorous 
beast to yield him flesh. The sole source of that food—the more needed 
from the absence of the bread-fruit and cocoanut trees, which he had left at 
Hawaii, and the colder climate of the land to which he had been driven— 
was in the various kinds of huge birds incapable of flight.” And again, 
when referring to the Australian dingo :—* With the remains of the extinct 
birds of New Zealand, I have received evidences of the dog of the Maoris, 
and abundant proofs, in ancient cooking pits, of their contemporaneity 
with species of Dinornis. But I have found nothing to affect the inference 
that the Maoris brought with them in their canoes, when they first came to 
New Zealand, their dogs as well as their wives and children." Such 
* Trans. N.Z. Inst., Vol. XL, p. 106. + Trans. N.Z. Inst., Vol. X., p. 97. 
} Trans. Royal Col. Inst., 1879. 
