26 The N.Z. Journal of Science and Technology. [Jan. 
rate at which it pays to buy energy for the same purpose in Australia. 
At first the industry would be confined to the high-grade cast steels, costing 
before the war £40 to £60 per ton, and now worth double to treble this 
figure. At the present prices of scrap steel and Lake Coleridge power it 
will be possible to smelt these cast steels at substantially less than the 
pre-war cost. 
For welding the oxy-acetylene and oxy-acetone processes are well 
established and are doing useful work. But electric welding is already in 
use in Christchurch and Wellington, and is making rapid strides elsewhere. 
In the domestic sphere the economies of time, labour, material, and 
temper, resulting from the general use of hydro-electric power for washing, 
sweeping, sewing, heating, cooking, pumping, and lighting, will amount 
to a revolution in the conditions of woman’s labour which is hardly yet- 
conceived. 
In these and other directions the introduction of cheap hydro-electric 
power is already resulting in Canterbury in a step forward in industrial 
and economic conditions more far-reaching in their results than the most 
sanguine predictions. 
The Maori System of Measurement. 
By Elsdon Best, Dominion Museum. 
It may be said that the Maori possessed no precise system of measurement, 
no recognized and universal standard of an immutable type universally 
employed by the people. Such a condition we should naturally expect to 
find among an uncivilized folk in the Neolithic plane of culture. The 
various industries practised by the Maori had not advanced to that pitch 
wherein a precise standard becomes absolutely necessary. The arts of house¬ 
building, canoe-making, wood-carving, painting, weaving, and tattooing, as 
executed by these natives, certainly called for a considerable amount of 
precision, but actual measuring by means of a mechanical medium entered 
but little into such execution. The medium employed in attaining excellent 
results in these arts was the eye of the operator. Here we encounter an 
attribute of uncultured man—-the keen “ true ” eye that so readily detects 
any irregularity or discrepancy. This faculty is on a par with others pos¬ 
sessed by the Maori, as the powers of hearing and of smell, as also their 
remarkable sense and rendering of time in concerted movements of the 
body or limbs, and in the rendering of vocal music. The Maori achieved 
a regularity and precision by the use of the eye alone that would be 
unattainable by the average European. They did remarkably good work 
without the assistance of a foot-rule. 
The standards of measurement employed by the Maori may be termed 
personal ones : it may almost be said that every man was a standard unto 
himself, inasmuch as the human body and limbs were the mediums em¬ 
ployed in measuring. The use of the rauru, or me'asuring-rod, hereinafter 
described, may possibly be looked upon as the first step in the fixing of 
a mechanical medium of measurement, although such a unit would be 
awkward on account of its length. Had the evolution of a standard been 
carried further, then a reduction of the fathom unit must inevitably have 
