WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. . 
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT. 
[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 13th February, 1884.*] 
ABSTRACT. 
- Referring to the Transactions of the Institute, Dr. Buller stated that he wished, 
having said so much in praise of the annual volume, to call attention to what appeared to 
him a very serious defect in it. He referred to the extreme paucity of articles relating to 
the Maori inhabitants of the country, their mythology, their manners and customs, their 
ecco their habits of life, their treatment of the sick, burial of the dead, and so forth. 
ethnologist of the future will naturally look to the ** Transactions" for reliable infor- 
mation on all these points. Newspaper aep is ephemeral, and not always reliable ; 
but the fact that every paper is vouched for by the name of the author is some sort of 
guarantee Lee! none but S RTE es will be found in the pages of the 
& omes 
ooking " the fact that the Maori race was dying out very rapidly, and that, in all 
sida five and twenty years hence there would only be a remnant left, it was of 
the first importance, from an ethnological or ethnographical point of view, to collect 
and preserve, while yet there was opportunity, a faithful history of so interesting a 
people. He (Dr. Buller) had often heard Maoris themselves speculate on their speedy 
extinction, saying in a melancholy way, that as the Norwegian had destroyed the native rat, 
and as the indigenous birds and shrubs were being supplanted by the introduced ones, so 
surely would the Maori disappear before the pakeha. And this was no mere fancy. The 
abnormal condition of the population—the females far outnumbering the males—was the 
surest indication of national decay. ^ Every successive enumeration of the people told its 
sad tale, and the decrease must of necessity go on in a progressive ratio. In Cook's time 
the Maori population was estimated at a hundred EOS at the period of our first 
colonization of the islands at seventy thousand; and hi opinion was that at the 
present m iei do not number, men, women, and "deae more than thirty thousand. 
of districts swarming with Maoris in former years, now depopulated. He 
had ni php hapus disappear, and he had seen an entire family die out in the c 
of a year. Twenty years ago he was rt BE as Native Resident Magistrate at Manini 
and he had then under his nominal control and management some 2,500 Maoris. It — 
would be difficult now within the same AER to find as many hundreds. In 1866 he was 
resent at Rangitikei when Dr Featherston paid over the purchase money of the Mana- 
watu Block, amounting to £25,000, and there were some 1,500 natives present. It was 
por io pay over to the natives, in a month's P double that amount, for the 
Otamakapua Block, and he doubted whether in the e district 300 will be brought 
power for that purpose, even counting the Hawke's Bay "pede Last week he was 
took some visitors tothe Maori church. There, where formerly about 1,000 
* This abstract was supplied ioo late for insertion in its proper place in vol. xvi., 
p. 557. 1 
