CorENso.—On the Moa. 91 
—When you travel, join yourself to the company of the great chief Te Wha- 
puku, that you may eat of all the choicest delicacies (particularly game and 
wild fowl) ;—which delicates are stated to be (by an old Maori chief com- 
menting thirty years ago on this very saying) “ birds” (pigeons and tuis) 
** potted in their own fat in calabashes, parrots, and ground-parrots (kaakaa- 
poo), rats, and eels, and berries of the tawa and hinau trees."— Another 
pregnant omission ! 
4. If their old proverbs contained little allusion to the Moa, their old 
poetry contained still less (as far as is known to me.) And here I may also 
briefly mention two peculiar quaint poetical ditties of the old Maoris, both 
being long laments after nice and plentiful food formerly known and eaten ; 
in which every chief article of pleasant food is severally noticed, together 
with its habitat. The one being a kind of nursery-song, chaunted to a child 
while nursing it; the other the lament of the chief Kahungunu (who lived 
twenty-one generations back), when away in the cold Patea country in the 
interior ; in both of which, while mention is made of many birds, no allu- 
sion whatever is made to the big fleshy food-yielding Moa! 
5. Moreover, while the ancient Maori possessed charms and spells, and 
prayers for luck in plenty for everything they did, particularly for fishing 
and fowling and the snaring of rats; and such, too, varied for every dif- 
ferent animal whether of the land or of the sea; how is it that there is 
none for the Moa ?. which must by far have been the most difficult to catch 
or kill; or, at all events, by far the biggest game of all! Here we have, 
still extant, those charms and spells for being successful in taking the 
various birds—kiwi (Apteryx), kaakaapoo (ground-parrot), koitareke (quail), 
weka (wood-hen), kaakaa (brown parrot), kautuku (white heron), huia 
(Heteralocha), kereru (pigeon), tuit (parson-bird), pukeko (swamp-hen), parera 
(duck), whio (blue mountain-duck), kawau (shag), and toroa (albatross)— 
—besides the various petrels (?) taiko, toanui, titii, and oi; some of those 
charms being also of great antiquity, and yet there is none for capturing 
the Moa! This alone has ever been to me an unanswerable argument. 
6. In travelling in the interior of this North Island—largely I may say 
—more than forty years back, I have often had pointed out to me the old 
land-marks of the game preserves of the ancient Maori, particularly of the 
ground game—as quail, kiwi, kaakaapoo (ground-parrot), and weka; and 
the mountain-passes where, in the breeding-season, the tiitii (petrel) was 
taken in a foggy night by firelight; and also the cliffs on rivers which were 
smoked and scaled for the fat young of the kawau (shag) ere they were able 
to fly; even then, at that time, some of those birds had become extinct (as, 
notably, the quail and ground-parrot), the young men had never seen them, 
but the old ones had, and caught and eaten them too, in great plenty; and 
