Hood. — On Changes in tlte Physical Geogra'phy of N.Z. 115 



indeed from that place scarce any was visible — and the ascent of the upper 

 portion of the peak was made over scoria and ashes loose as those of the 

 summit of Yesuviiis. By rolling stones down into deep clefts or crevasses in 

 the frozen snow and ice which fill the basin of the crater a good estimate 

 could be formed of the great profundity of the abyss. 



Whether witnessed by the Maori or not^ from the materials which compose 

 it and the small amount of dilapidation its peak has undergone, there seems 

 no reason to doubt the activity of Taranaki Mountain during the human 

 epoch in the Polynesian seas. Old men of the present generation have seen 

 great changes in the aspect of a portion of the Savaii (the Samoan Hawaiki). 

 Were the gently swelling plain of Matauto in that island — now dotted round 

 with the villages of the natives amidst the groves by its margin, and covered 

 with lavas which flowed early in the present century, so rent and fissured that 

 it is next to impossible to reach their source in the deep sunken crater in its 

 centre, the walls of which do not rise above the level of the surrounding sea of 

 rocks — to be bulged up by degrees to a considerable elevation around the 

 crater, and the huge angular masses of lava covered up with the showers of 

 lapilli, volcanic sands, and torrents of moya ejected from time to time, it would 

 present, on a lesser scale^ much the same features, so far as the landscape is 

 concerned, that Mount Egmont may have done to the first dwellers on the 

 Waimate Plain, and when a higher crystalline cone is at length super-imposed, 

 those which that stately mountain does now. 



Persons who have no respect for the traditions of semi-barbarous men, for- 

 getting how many of the most cherished beliefs of civilized peoples are founded 

 entirely upon the ones handed down from the time when their own pro- 

 genitors were in a similar condition, may smile at the production of such 

 evidence, but as in the case of the Auckland volcano, proofs may yet be forth- 

 coming of the correctness of the convictions of the natives. 



Some time since a dispute occurred between the Taranaki and Puketajou 

 tribes respecting the boundary line between their respective territories, and the 

 claim of the latter to have it carried across the summit of the peak was re- 

 sisted by their neighbours upon the ground that the original pahs of their 

 ancestors lie deep buried on its slopes. The debate was long and eager, but 

 the traditional evidences produced were in the end received by the Puketapus 

 as establishing the right of the Taranaki chiefs to the whole area of the moun- 

 tain which destroyed during the great eruption the villages on its flanks. 



Many persons are under the impression that it is an accepted fact that the 

 history of the Maori in these islands dates back only three or four hundred 

 years. But it is not so. Mr. Hale, who accompanied the United States 

 Expedition, and who made the ethnology of the Polynesians his especial study, 

 gives three thousand years as the period which has probably elapsed since the 



