Ballou Maturin Murray - Foot-prints of Travel: or, Journeyings in Many Lands стр 27.

skeleton shows the marvellous bird to have been, when standing upright, five feet taller than the average full-grown giraffe. It belonged to the giants who dwelt upon the earth perhaps twenty thousand years ago, in the period of the mammoth and the dodo.

A couple of hundred miles further north will bring us to Wellington, the national capital. After a narrow entrance is passed, the harbor opens into a magnificent sheet of water, in which the largest ships may ride in safety and discharge their cargoes at wharves built close to the busy centre of the town. Here, as in Dunedin, a portion of land has been reclaimed from the sea for business purposes. The city has its asylums, a college, hospital, botanical garden, Roman Catholic cathedral, and a colonial museum, the latter being of more than ordinary interest in the excellence and completeness of its several departments. A structure which is exhibited here and called the Maori House, built by the natives as a specimen of their domestic architecture, is particularly interesting, being also full of aboriginal curiosities, such as domestic utensils, weapons, and carvings. The house is of ordinary village size, and is ornamented on many of its posts by carved figures, representing native heroes and gods. The province of Wellington stretches northward a hundred and fifty miles and contains seven million acres of land, diversified by two mountain ranges. The population of the capital is a little over twenty thousand. The town impresses one as being a community of shops, and it is a subject of surprise how they can all obtain a living.

A considerable number of natives, mostly in European costume, are seen in the streets of Wellington, loitering about the corners and gazing curiously into shop windows, the girls and women having heavy shocks of unkempt hair shading their great black eyes, high cheek-bones, and disfigured mouths and chins, which last are tattooed in blue dye of some sort. The males tattoo the whole face elaborately, but the women disfigure themselves thus only about the mouth and chin. It is most amusing to see them meet one another and rub noses, which is the Maori mode of salutation. This race has some very peculiar habits: they never eat salt; they have no fixed industry, and no idea of time or its divisions into hours and months; they are, like our North American Indians, constitutionally lazy, are intensely selfish, and seem to care nothing for their dead; they have a quick sense of insult, but cannot as a rule be called pugnacious; they excite themselves to fight by indulging in strange war-dances and by singing songs full of braggadocio; and, after having been thus wrought up to a state of frenzy, they are perfectly reckless as to personal hazard. The Maori is not, however, a treacherous enemy; he gives honorable notice of his hostile intent, warring only in an open manner, thus exhibiting a degree of chivalry unknown to our American Indians. Money with the Maori is considered only as representing so much rum and tobacco. Alcohol is his criterion of value; bread and meat are quite secondary.

The name "Maori" is that which these aborigines gave themselves. If there were any human beings upon these islands when the Maoris first arrived, they doubtless fell a prey to the cannibalistic habits of the newcomers, whose insatiable appetite for human flesh was irrepressible. When discovered by Cook, they were the lowest of savage races; they knew scarcely anything of the mechanic arts, their skill being limited to the scooping out of a boat from the trunk of a tree, and the fabrication of fishing-nets from the coarse fibre of the wild flax. They also made spears, shields, and clubs. They had no beasts of burden, and so their women were made to supply the place. Their agriculture was confined to the raising of sweet potatoes and the taro root, while their more substantial food consisted of fish, rats, wild fowl, and human flesh. Captain Cook estimated, when he first visited them, that the Maoris had passed the period of their best days. He thought that in the century previous to his coming hither they had eaten about one-fourth of their number. The race is now estimated at only thirty-six or thirty-eight thousand, though it is certain that it embraced a hundred thousand about a century ago. The decrease in ten years is apparent to observant persons, a fact not clearly accounted for by any excess of living on their part, though their daily habits are not very commendable, especially as to drink. They are all most inveterate smokers, men, women, and children; you can give a Maori maiden nothing more acceptable to her taste and appreciation than a pipe and a plug of smoking-tobacco. As a people, they have manifestly filled the purpose for which Providence

placed them upon these islands of the South Sea; and now, like the Moa, they must pass off the scene and give way to another race. So it seems to be with the Red Man of America, and so it was with the now totally extinct natives of Tasmania.