CoLENSO. — On the Maori Baces of New Zealand. 399 



sea, and, in some few cases, of their having been killed by some renowned hero 

 of former days. Now in most of these instances alluded to (some of which 

 places the writer has seen and examined) , a thousand years would scarcely 

 suffice for their subsequent forests and depth of vegetable humus. Again, 

 the stone canoes in which those mythical emigrants arrived, scattered on both 

 the East and "West Coast, one. being on the crest of a high range, twenty 

 miles from the sea ; the footmarks of Eongokako, one of those emigrants, 

 also left in stone at various parts of the East Coast ; the several men 

 metamorphosed into large perpendicular stones at Manaia, in Whangarei 

 Harbour, &c., &c., all indicate a long time'back in the old night preceding all 

 history, or such conspicuous stones would not have been handed down and 

 narrated by such a shrewd inquisitive race as the New Zealanders. Lastly, 

 the tradition which the writer received in 1837, from an intelligent aged 

 " priest" in the Bay of Plenty, respecting Tuhua, or Mayor Island, there, viz. 

 that anciently the northern natives obtained their prized greenstone from 

 that island ; but that the guardian god being vexed, covered it with excre- 

 mentitious substances, and swam away with the fish which produced it to the 

 South Island, whence subsequently all the greenstone was with difficulty 

 obtained. Now, as the island is an eruptive volcanic mass, this tradition, in 

 more ways than one, points to a time long since past. Often what is not 

 scientifically correct has in it a deep and pregnant truth of feeling. 



(2.) Archaeology . — In repeated travelling in the North Island, from Cook 

 Strait to Cape Maria van Diemen, during more than a quarter of a century, 

 and that by by-paths long disused, through forests and over mountain and 

 hniy ranges, the writer has been often astonished at the signs frequently 

 met with of a very numerous ancient population, who once dwelt in places 

 long since desolate and uninhabited : such as the number and extent of 

 their hill forts, cut, levelled, escarped, moated, and fenced only with immense 

 labour, considering they had no iron tools and the number and extent of 

 their ancient cultivations, all long since overgrown ; and the enormous 

 mounds of river, lake, and sea-shells, sometimes clearly revealing the slow 

 accretions through years or centuries, by their accumulations having been 

 made stratum super stratum with intervening layers of vegetabje mould and 

 humus, each stratum of shell possessing small fragments of obsidian, which 

 mineral (used by them for cutting their hair and themselves in lamentation, 

 and also for scraping their finer woodwork), being only found in one or two 

 districts, had been brought from a great distance. He also noticed, and that 

 in more than one or two places, that some of the ancient New Zealanders 

 buried their dead in the earth or sand ; skulls having been met with and 

 skeletons which had been buried, and from which the winds had removed the 

 soil. On inquiry it was found that none of the present generation knew 



