Origin of the Maoris.

Evening Star, Issue 6915, 30 May 1885, Page 2

Origin of the Maoris.

Judge Fenton, of Auckland, has devoted considerable labor and time to investigating the origin of the Maori race. Summing-up his conclusions, he says;

It is not part of our undertaking to enter kito any inquiry as to the subsequent migrations of this ancient race amongst the islands of the Pacific. In such migrations the Maoris have taken ho part. The sum of our investigations, I submit, is: (1) That the Maoris are the same people as the Mavuts, Moors or Moris of the Malay Archipelago, the Mahri, or lloineriiai and Hi.nyarites of South Arabia, and that their eponyinie ancestor is fliinyar, the third in descent from Joktau, the son of Kber, the ancestor of the Hebrews; and (-) that the other tribes of Polynesia are members of the same great family and nation, branching off, genealogically speaking, from the same stock in the epoch of Himyar; and that they all, under the names of Chaldeans, Babylonians, Cushites, Akkauians, or Ethiopians, dwelt together with representatives of all the Noachic of man in the plains of Shinar from the very earliest ages, speaking a language which bore as much resemblance to the Maori language of to-day as the Aramaic of Abraham and his ancestors does to the existing Hebrew of that patriarch’s descendants—probably a much greater resemblance. A few years hence, when the race of men whose varied career we have been following from the time when they walked with Abram in the great city of Ur, through their periods of grandeur in Southern Arabia, and whose wanderings we have accompanied in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, shall have disappeared from the face of the earth, their history will possess an interest which no human effort can now excite. We have been present at their cradle in the great Mesopotamian basin, before the races of men had dispersed themselves over the earth, and we or our children will, it can scarcely be doubted, stand over their grave. Their ancestors were building huge temples in honor of the hosts of Heaven, which they worshipped as gods, and conducting a gorgeous, though cruel, religion, and Mere subjects of a splendid empire, whose literature and libraries still exist, at a time when our own ancestors were wandering an unknown people in the regions of Central Asia. Let, then, the great English nation treat the remnant of the race with gentleness, and learn from their varied career the transitory nature of all human greatness.