CoLENSO. — On the Maori Races of New Zealand. 403 



one or two of tlie sub-dialects to become both commonly used and domi- 

 nant) ; could those tribes also severally set aside their own many peculiar 

 words, and adopt words which were strange and new (N.Z.), in such a short 

 period ? or, rather, did they not gradually do so, through the long lapse of 

 ages, and of little intercourse, while they still retained their characteristic 

 tribal pronunciation and manner of speaking ? 



(6.) Beligion. — It is well known that the Sandwich islanders (Hawaii or 

 Hawaiki) had an old and costly idolatrous worship, possessing ancient 

 temples and many ceremonies. It almost seems too ridiculous momentarily 

 to entertain such a notion as that such a ceremonial worship had only 

 originated 400 years before Cook visited them ; or, in other words, that it 

 sprang \x^ {de 7iovo) after our emigrants to New Zealand had left. Yet both 

 these positions the believers in the New Zealand immigration myth, from 

 that Hawaiki, must be prepared to support. For certainly, had those emi- 

 grants known of it, they could not so easily and entirely have cast it off. 

 So, again, at Savaii (or Hawaiki) of the Samoan group ; their religion was, 

 if possible, still farther from anything that either has, or reasonably might 

 have, obtained in New Zealand. For there, " every village had its god, and 

 its small temple consecrated to the deity of the place." A woman would 

 say, on the birth of her child, " I have got a child for so-and-so," and name 

 the village god.* In their village temples, too, were objects for veneration. 

 They also daily offered meat-offerings and drink-offerings to their god, and 

 this at home in every house. And their many taboos {tapii) — the sea-pike 

 taboo, the white shark taboo, the cross-stick taboo, the ulcer, the tic-doloreux, 

 and the death taboo, the rat, and the thunder taboo, &c. — were all differing 

 widely from anything which has ever obtained in New Zealand. 



(7.) The'Moa, Dinornis. — Its valuable evidence is purposely omitted, as 

 the writer still holds to his original opinion, published twenty-three years 

 ago,t and drawn both from geological deductions as well as from history, in 

 reference to its never having been seen alive by the present race of New 

 Zealanders. For if it had been seen by them, and by them had been 

 gradually killed and extirpated, as some Europeans have laboured to show, then 

 no surer evidence could be desired as to the great antiquity of the present 

 race in New Zealand. 



(8.) After examining and weighing all this evidence gathered from various 

 sources, the mind is irresistibly driven to accept the only logical conclusion, 

 that the time of the early or first peopling of New Zealand is one of high 

 antiquity. 



* Turner's " Nineteen Years in Polynesia," pp. 239, 240. 

 t In " Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science," Vol. II. 



