116 Transactions. — Miscellanea us. 



first migration of the ancestors of the Maori took place to their present abode. 

 Mr. Colenso, also, in his able paper, in which he does the justice so few do to 

 the native race, states his conviction that the time of the first peopling of New 

 Zealand is one of high antiquity. 



Their own mythical stories vary; the first discoverer of the country, 

 according to one, was Ngahue, who returned to Hawaiki with glowing 

 accounts of the island of great birds which he had found; another was Kupe, 

 who, putting to sea in quest of his fugitive wife, returned unsuccessful in 

 finding either her or his brother who had carried her off, but bringing to his 

 countrymen the news of the great and fertile land, where he had rested for a 

 time, for which the fleet of canoes conveying the earliest colonists shortly 

 steered their course. 



Genealogical traditions amongst all, even the most civilized nations, are 

 notoriously the most uncertain; none, we know well, are more utterly fabulous 

 than those gravely published by some in our own country, and it seems some- 

 what strange that the very same persons who persistently decline to receive 

 those handed down by the Maori as evidence of the contemporaneous existence 

 of the giant birds, and relating to other subjects, such as were most likely to 

 make an indelible impression upon the minds of a comparatively uncivilized 

 race, should insist upon implicit reliance being placed in their chronology, 

 based as it is of course solely upon their genealogical trees — heraldic sticks 

 literally — whilst they find no difficulty in making up their minds to admit 

 with the majority of the thinking men of the age that the genealogical tables 

 given in the Mosaic records are not to be taken as a measure of the time that 

 elapsed between those stupendous events which closed the elephantine period — 

 as Cuvier puts it — and the next and greatest era in the history of man. 



If, as Mr. Hale thinks, the voyage of the Maori Jason was undertaken at 

 a period equally remote as that of the Argonauts, we may well expect to find 

 the substratum of truth upon which their stories rest overlaid with, at all 

 events, an equal mass of fiction as that which surrounds the mythological 

 tale of the classical Greeks ; and we might indulge our imagination with the 

 consideration of still greater changes than those that we may reasonably 

 presume have occurred since the first emigrants from famed Hawaiki came to 

 the land of the Moa, without placing that event at quite so remote a date as 

 that distinguished philologist has done. 



If these long centuries have indeed passed away since then, we might 

 venture to picture the early Moa-hunters following their grand game over 

 plains still lying fair to the rising sun — much farther than they do now — the 

 remnant of those wide savannahs through which in times far more distant 

 flowed that great river which received all the torrents coming down from the 



lofty cordillera, robed with glaciers proportionate to its then greater altitude, 



