1 16 ADVENTURE IN NEW ZEALAND. Chap. IV. 
selected as such l>ecause it was the salient j)oinf in a 
vast uninhabited district, ten miles from the nearest 
human habitation, bearing the devastating marks of 
fiery convulsions, and in which no cultivation had ever 
been begun or thought of, or any occupation made ; be- 
cause it was frequently hidden from the eye of man in 
whirling clouds and in spouting steam ; because it was 
the dread abode of snow and storm ; because man had 
never dared to ascend its sides, or to examine the wild 
chasms in its vicinity. 
By the same argument, I should prove my private 
property in the altar of a church by forbidding a pro- 
fane intruder from stamping on its sacred surface ; or 
the sanctum sanctorum of the ark of the Israelites 
should be considered the private property of theLevites, 
who forbade the entrance of the vulgar within its 
bounds. Thus Mr. Coates fails to distinguish between 
the feeling of religious veneration which prompts any 
one to save what he holds holy from desecration, and 
the mere worldly wish of a proprietor to keep tres- 
passers off his estate, or off the manor to which he has 
a common right with his fellows. 
Oddly enough, he has brought the mysterious prop 
of the chieftainship, which the present missionary 
system conduces to destroy, as a proof of the property 
of savages over land on which they never set foot, 
which the individual missionaries are so anxious to 
maintain. 
Heuheus speech to me sufficiently proved that he, 
at that time, acknowledged a territory as yet un- 
claimed ; for he begged me not to bring many White 
people into the interior, " lest they should gradually 
" encroach on the possessions of the natives" 
The old chief, I fear, must have been speaking in a 
bitter spirit of irony to Mr. Brown, when he told him 
