6 Transactions.—Miscellaneous. 
few subjects only. Everyone knows how an illiterate herdsman will a 
at once every little peculiarity of cach member of a large herd entrusted 7 
his care, though, at first sight, scarcely anything would seem more difiiet 
in individualizing than the ordinary sheep of a large flock. Again, in all 
the early and rude states of society, abundant songs and tales of the 
people are found to have been invariably preserved by the people, ages 
before any form of writing had been invented: while, we know that, in 
highly civilized India, where letters were, practically, unknown, even three 
centuries before the Christian era, the whole of the Sanskrit Védas, as well 
as many of the most important commentaries on them, were presceved, in 
the memories of members of the different Brahmaniec colleges, whose pride 
was enlisted in the accurate recollection of the most minute modifications 
of the sounds and letters of individual words. To maintain the absolute 
invariabity of these Hymns was the business of their life; and their 
memories were not distracted by attention to anything else. 
In the case of the New Zealander, while the demands on _ his powers 
of memory were infinitely less, we have reason to believe that his 
Lohungas, ov priests, continued constantly repeating these legends, one 
from the other, and, no doubt, generally, in the same words. It is not 
necessary to take these tales for more than they are worth, nor do I wish 
to claim for them a solid historical basis ; but I have as much confidence 
in them as in the early legends of Greece and Rome, some of which, 
especially in the case of Rome, are now seen to have had a far more real 
foundation, than the sceptical historians of the early part of this century 
were willing to admit. There is nothing, indeed, in the nature of the case, 
against the probability, that the Maori stories do rest on ultimate facts. 
Many circumstances, and not the least of these, the admitted fact that the 
New Zealand chiefs (as was the case, also, in other islands) were, even in 
life, held to have a quast-superhuman character, have thrown their 
mythology into inextricable confusion ; but, even, allowing the probability 
that, as suggested before, some local colourings may have been engrafted 
on the answers given to the first questions propounded to the Maoris 
by the missionaries or early settlers,} it does not follow that there was no 
* It is mentioned, I think, by Mr. Ellis, that the native chiefs of the Sandwich 
Islands have preserved the names of their kings from father to son for a hundred 
stlecessions—which igs by no means i 
improbable as it is the most important, if not the 
only thing they would care to record 
+ There is a constant tendency, 
to give that answer to any question 
An Eastern or an Irish peasant illu 
especially, among uneducated but shrewd savages 
which they think the enquirer would like to have. 
strates, as well as any one else, this remark, Arch- 
