838 Essays. 



The present native inhabitants o£ New Zealand are evidently, to a certain 

 extent, a mixed race containing two elements, one of which may be called 

 the pure Indian, the other being the Papuan. The marked characteristics 

 of the former are a brown or copper-coloured skin, black hair, sometimes 

 sandy (called by them hurukehu) , straight, wavy, or curling, and a tolerably 

 well-formed nose, sometimes even aquiline ; while those in Avhom the Papuan 

 element is most marked have the skin much darker, the hair black and crisp 

 (but not growing in separate tufts like that of the true blooded Papuans), 

 the nose flat and broad at the nostrils, and the lips more full and prominent. 

 Between these extremes, every intermediate variety of feature may be met 

 with among the New Zealanders ; but their prevailing type of feature is the 

 Indian. 



To account for this mixture some persons have suggested that a Papuan 

 race was found in possession of the country by the ancestors of the New 

 Zealanders when they first arrived, and that the mixed breed had sprung 

 from alliances between the two races. It has even been stated that the 

 Papuan element belongs more especially to slaves, who are supposed to 

 have sprung principally from the subdued and degraded race. Such state- 

 ments, however, have no trustworthy foundation ; for the crisp hair prevails 

 equally among the rangatira, or gentleman class, and among slaves. Besides, 

 the traditions of the New Zealanders speak ^of the country as being unin- 

 habited on the arrival of their canoes from Hawaiki ; and in the other islands 

 of Polynesia there exist similar indications of a mixed race. 



These traces of a mixed race are easily accounted for by supposing, as 

 indeed appears certain, that the Indian Archijoelago and the Malay Peninsula 

 were primitively inhabited by Papuans, and that the brown or copper- 

 coloured race, whom we have called Indian, invaded their country and took 

 possession of parts of it ; for a long time must have elapsed between their 

 first invasion of the Malay Peninsula and their conquest of the Philippine 

 Islands, from which points we suppose the ancestors of the Polynesians to 

 have migrated. And during the interval, in which the two races remained so 

 nearly in contact, while the one was being supplanted or absorbed by the 

 other, alliances must have taken place between individuals of opposite sexes, 

 giving rise to the appearance of a mixed race now observable. 



