50 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



Art. V. — On the Ignorance of the Ancient New Zealander of the Use of Projectile 

 Weapons. By Coleman Phillips. 

 [Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, '2.2ncl November, 1879.] 

 Mk. W. Colenso, in a paper contributed to the Hawke's Bay Philosophical 

 Institute last year, headed as above,* replies at some length to a short paper 

 I had the honour of reading before the Wellington Philosophical Society 

 duriug the Session of 1877, t entitled, "On a pecidiar Method of Arrow 

 Propulsion as observed amongst the Maoris." Mr. Colenso's paper appears 

 to me worthy of the greatest consideration, and I readily forgive his some- 

 what discourteous allusions to my remarks, seeing that I have been led to 

 enquire more fully into a subject of so much interest. I propose in the 

 following paper to add to the authorities quoted by Mr. Colenso, and set 

 out the further knowledge we possess of the use of the bow and arrow among 

 other savage nations. We may thus be able to deduce, from so many 

 scattered facts, some ethnological analogy concerning the " Whence of the 

 Maori." 



I must confess, however, that, in my opinion, far too much importance 

 has been attached, by pm'ely local writers, to this question. Had any one 

 of these writers travelled among and seen the different sections of the 

 Malayan or Papuan races, inhabiting the South Sea Islands, he would not 

 have exalted the question of the " Whence of the Maori" into the position 

 to which he has exalted it. Mr, Colenso, who fairly enough represents this 

 party, takes me severely to task for having ventured to say, in effect, that 

 the Maori was merely one of those sections, and that his ancestry would be 

 found among some of the people inhabiting one of the Pacific groups of 

 islands. I imagine thcxt I am justified in making such a statement. Pro- 

 fessor Owen, in May last, when reading a paper before the Eoyal Colonial 

 Institute on the extinct animals of the Colonies of Great Britain, I observed : — 

 "When the Maori first landed he found no kangaroo or other herbivorous 

 beast to yield him flesh. The sole source of that food— the more needed 

 from the absence of the bread-fruit and cocoanut trees, nhich he had left at 

 Hawaii, and the colder climate of the land to which he had been driven — 

 was in the various kinds of huge bu'ds incapable of flight." And again, 

 when referring to the Australian dingo : — " With the remains of the extinct 

 birds of New Zealand, I have received evidences of the dog of the Maoris, 

 and abundant proofs, in ancient cooking pits, of their contemporaneity 

 with species of Dinornis. But I have found nothing to affect the inference 

 that the Maoris brought with them in then- canoes, ichen they first came to 

 New Zealand, their dogs as well as their wives and childr-en." Such 



' * Trans. N.Z. Inst., Vol. XI., p. 106. f Trans. N.Z. Inst., Vol. X., p. 97. 



+ Trans. Eoyal Col. Inst., 1879. 



