4 
INTRODUCTION. 
culture or war ; he can make ornaments of ivory or of 
the hardest stone, and these too with the most simple and 
apparently unsuitable instruments, sawing his ivory without 
loss, with a muscle-shell, and his hard green jade stone one 
piece with another, with only the addition of a little sand and 
water ; and all these works, it must be remembered, he could 
accomplish without the aid of iron, which was unknown 
before Cookes time. It is not a single individual, or a few 
only, who are adepts in these various arts, but all. The 
implements they make, they also know how to use ; they 
can hunt, fish, and fight. In the battle-field they are 
warriors ; in the council orators ; their skill in military 
tactics has- elicited the wonder of our military men, and 
the present sad war has proved them to be enemies not to 
be despised. It would be no easy matter to find Europeans 
who, in so many respects, could equal the contemned savage 
of New Zealand. 
Such general knowledge made the native at home wherever 
he might be. The author has often had opportunities of 
admiring this power of adaptation to present circumstances ; 
when encamped with his little party in pouring rain, he 
has been surprised at the short time it took, to erect a 
comfortable water-tight shed, to produce fire by fric- 
tion, to find fuel and ignite it, to seek food and sit down 
comfortably to enjoy it, and this before many would have 
made up their minds what to do. An instance of this 
occurred some years ago, when the late Allan Cunningham, 
the well-known botanist of Australia and New Zealand, was 
accompanied by one of our missionaries on a journey through 
a New Zealand forest ; whilst busily employed in examining 
its varied productions, they allowed their natives to push on 
to a spot where they usually encamped, and, carried away by 
their love of nature, did not perceive the lapse of time, until 
they were suddenly overtaken by the shades of night ; to 
make their uncomfortable position worse, it set in rainy ; to 
overtake their companions was impracticable, for such, is 
the gloom of a New Zealand forest, and the over-grown 
ill- defined tracks through it, that it is quite impossible to 
