Abstract
THIS little book contains a theory that the ancestors of the New Zealanders belonged to the Aryan race, and were a pastoral people. To signify this, the cover is adorned with a golden picture, seemingly representing a Maori warrior in native guise, accompanied by a sturdy little Highland bull. Now, it being notorious that the New Zealanders, when discovered, had no cattle nor remains of them in their country, the reader's curiosity is aroused to see how Mr. Edward Tregear supports this unlikely thesis. His method proves to be a philological paradox which we have never met with before. For example, it is argued (p. 31) that the Maoris once knew the bull by a word like the latin taurus, a bull. How so, one asks, when they no more had the word in their vocabulary than the beast on their land? The answer is, that in the absence of the word taurus itself the author relies on a dozen or so of other Maori words which he alleges to refer to it. The following are a few of them:—Tara, had courage; tararau made a loud noise; tararua, had two points or peaks; tareha, was red; tarehu, caught one unawares; tarore, had a noose put on him; taruke, lay dead in numbers (if it was characteristic of the bulls to lie dead in numbers, how multitudinous the cows arid calves must have been in the Aryan-Maori herds !). The poverty of the Maori language in consonants makes it easy to the author to play this fanciful game with his dictionary to his own full satisfaction. He takes a real interest in studying the Maoris, and though he has gone astray this time, he may, if a young man, do something more worth doing in the collection of native customs, legends, games, and the like which the older natives still remember.
The Aryan Maori.
By Edward Tregear. (Wellington, N.Z.: George Didsbury, 1885.)
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Our Book Shelf . Nature 34, 286 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/034286a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/034286a0