Abstract
IT is most fortunate that Mr. Percy Smith was able to publish the fourth and authoritative edition of this book before his death, as it contains a considerable amount of new material and of revised conclusions. It represents the gleaning of a long life spent in amassing new data, and laboriously sifting and collating existing information. All students of oceanic ethnology owe a great debt to this painstaking, kindly, and learned pioneer. Mr. Smith entirely justifies his reliance on the general accuracy of tradition, and he has been able to give approximate dates to events in unwritten history, and also to trace three main migrations into the Pacific from Indonesia, and numerous migrations within the Polynesian area. Constructive work of this kind on imperfect material is necessarily open to criticism, but Mr. Smith courageously attempts to interpret hints and obscure words, and by imagination, controlled by intimate knowledge of Polynesian ethnology, he has made a plausible connected story, which, in his concluding words, “will in the meantime serve the purpose of a summary of the history of the people, on which others may build.”
Hawaiki: the Original Home of the Maori. With a Sketch of Polynesian History.
By S. Percy Smith. Fourth edition. Pp. 288 + 20 plates. (Auckland, Melbourne and London: Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd., 1921.) 12s. 6d.
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HADDON, A. Hawaiki: the Original Home of the Maori With a Sketch of Polynesian History. Nature 111, 736 (1923). https://doi.org/10.1038/111736b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/111736b0