MR STOWELL’S ABLE PAPER.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1354, 10 February 1898, Page 34

MR STOWELL’S ABLE PAPER.

TO THE EDITOR. , Sir,— As it was “ less than a hundred years ago” since the Tohunga-ariki of the Maori taught his disciples all the wonderful things Mr Stowell has enumerated, don’t you think it is possible one might still be alive P As they toiled not, they lived long, and perhaps in the fastnesses of the Urewera country among the Tuhoe people, who are supposed to be of the autochthones, may be found some ancient Tohunga, sitting in- contemplative mood, like Buddha, before his shrine, whilst his senses are soothed by the song of the moa. It is most important that one should be discovered, for the information we could get would obviate oceans of tedious investigations from obscure data, and just as Mr Stowell tells us, a cataclysm is responsible for what we ignorantly concluded was the work of myriads of years, so by the instrumentality of the Tohunga the whole scheme of the universe would-be laid bare in one act. As I write, sir, "a feeling of sadness comes o’er me, a feeling akin to pain, which resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles rain.” And for this reason, sir. The revelations of Mr Stowell have brought so vividly before me the inferiority in erudition of the Caucasian. Scientific men of our puny race have been slowly building up a cosmic scheme from the theory of gravitation, the theory of atoms, the principles of evolution and discoveries which originated in ceaseless thought or fortuitous circumstance, whilst all the time a Neolithic race on the other side of the world knew all about it. Whilst we have been demonstrating that all matter is composed of molecules and molecules of indivisible atoms, the Tohunga "could explain the evolution and involution of the germ” and consequently knew all about the " original impress ” if involution means " the raising of quantities from their roots to any powers assigned.” It is wonderful! -Here we have always thought the heathen in his blindness knew just about enough to come in out of the rain, whilst all the time he was aware of the true inwardness of the germ and therefore the cause of life. Oh! sir, do catch a Tohungaariki; not a Tohunga of the common or garden kind, for such delight in tobacco and the tidal wave of colonial swipes, but a true ariki Tohunga—the real McCoy. Then again how simple and how easily understood is the Bowing of the stars through space by an anthropomorphous operator, whilst we have vainly imagined that the heavenly orbs were elementally gaseous bodies which, have very slowly

Conglobated rciiind a fiiiclefls add travffiitid iii specific orbits; a departure front which meant, disaster; as the eccentricity in the earth’s orbit Contributed towards the glioial period, but the Tohringa sets us fight; and tells us that Sirius carhe at the dotible from the rear and .stood at atten-. tion in his * l present position in the shy.” Seriously, these traditions are only valuable if they enable” us to connect tho Maori with any other ancient people. Now, just here comes in very aptly an assertion of Mr Stowell that the Tohunga told his people “ that the flesh of man encases the spirit# and that the spirit encases the soul and that s . . the spirit doss not perish with the body/’ I * believe Mr Tregear wrote a book to proVe that, the Maoris are an Aryan race# To Wllifci maintains they are Semitic. but here We hate Very direct evidence that they are descended irom the ancient Egyptians, WhiOh from their agglutinative language fliajr be thought to have been Turaniafi. You will see, sir, the importance of the divisions of the individual by the Tohunga into body, spirit and soul When you coiisider that the ancient Egyptians had exactly the Sameideas, and that the teasofi they put food ifito the graves of the dead was that the Spirit, the attendant spook, might find food when it Visited the casket. Passing over much wonderful lore, finally, sir, Mr Stowell suggests that the origin and history of the Maori people should be put into a connected form, for “ that history will point with the finger of fidelity to the great question of the origin of the human race.” Tradition is not foliable for long periods, with the exception perhaps of oral records of genealogy and tbC lists df kings/ Put Mr. Stowell believes that the history df the Maori will point with “ the fioger of fidelity ” to the origin of the human Tace, and it this is so, as he suggests the fragments should be at once piifc into connected form. Heie ate wfe, aftdr tracing Palaeolithic man into tbe Tertiary system and the Miocene period hoping to discover his origin in the Eocene, whilst we are neglecting a valuable source of information in the Tohungas of a Neolithic race who surely, having advanced so little, are nearer to primaeval man than we are. Let us continue investigating the “ Testimony of the Rocks” as .checks, and at the same time extract the lore of the Tohunga-arikis by the cyanide process. Our researches in history written in hieroglyphics on papyrus and on clay cylinders in cuneiform character take us back but 10,000 years; geology and paleontology some millions more or less, but in tbe Tohunga, if we can catch him, we have information which will point with the finger of fidelity to the origin of the human race first pop. And, sir, we might gain our knowledge on the co-operative principle instead of wringing it from rocks. —I am, &c., B. S. Thompson. Normanby, January 24th, 1898. P.S. —On second thoughts perhaps it would be as well to limit our enquiries from tbe Tohungas to points which will determine the question as to which continent the Maoris first emigrated from, Asia or America ?