E—No. 7

LECTURES ON them place these upon the most hallowed part of his person,—the shoulders and the head—while the three ate from them. My hearers will remember that the hair of the head beyond all things is the chosen seat of the gods of a Maori priest, and that cooked food is the abominable thing that defiles and pollutes beyond all others. This to the Maori was the utmost and most daring profanation ; this, therefore, he did, not only to defy the gods, and drive them from him,but to testify to all others that he had done so, and that they had no power to avenge upon him the insult he had offered ; soon afterwards he was baptized by the Christian name of Zaccheus. We doubt not that many here present have often heard of the great Ngapuhi Chief Mohi Tawhai, the friend and ally of our forces in the North, and whom we have already more than once mentioned. A similar act of selfdesecration may be recorded of him: doubting the power of his gods, he resolved to test it; and knowing that it was not lawful for cooked food to be near his head, and that he must not sit within a cooking house, or even enter into it, he notwithstanding bade one of his slaves take a pot and cook food in it, and eat from it ; then filling the 'pot with water he washed his head with it, and sitting down he waited the result; he has said since that he actually perspired with deadly fear, watching the sun g-o down, for if the sun set upon him, and he living, that was the appointed sign, viz., that the gods of the Maori were but false ones, and that their power over him was gone, while the God of the Christian was the true God, and thenceforward he would be his disciple. To a certain extent we may even consider the priest as holding the position and discharging the duties of a General. The Maori Tohunga not only predicted the events of battle, but he directed the movements of the tribe and often led them to the attack ; and this leads us to the third main division of our lecture, —the ceremonies and incantations used in war, and the omens and superstitions therewith connected. But before we proceed further, we must request you to bear in mind one great difference between Maori wars and those of civilized nations. To commence, therefore, with such omens as portend the likelihood of war:—lt is customary with the New Zealanders to fulfil to the utmost extent any request made by a dying Chief. Such a request is called " Poroaki," and its meaning is confined solely to this custom: —Any offence given, or murder committed, for which satisfaction has not been obtained, the dying Chief will remind his relatives of the fact, and nominate some particular person of a future generation, the whole aim of whose life shall be to take vengeance. Although it is not necessary that the family of the party who committed the injury should be the victims to propitiate the wrong committed, for vengeance may be obtained from any other tribe, yet the family or tribe of the injuring party are looked upon by the family of the murdered man as their " uto" or object of vengeance ; no tribe therefore in New Zealand, however apparently at peace with all its neighbours, could at any moment tell whether the storm of war was not just ready to burst upon it. I know of two such cases or l'oroakis, in one of which the nominated person is the grandson, in the other .the great-grandson of the dying Chief; happily, however, Christianity will prevent these and other satanio injunctions of a similar kind from ever being carried into effect. Birds, of course, as they have done in every country, afford a fenile source of omens; if the cry of tho Pie is heard from the landward of a traveller, it is counted a sign of a war party coming from the same direction ; if a settlement is to be attacked, a god comes in the night time in the likeness of a bird, and warns them with the cry of " Ka toto, ka toto" (there will be blood, there will be blood) ; there is also a night bird called Hokio, which on the eve of war is heard continually to repeat " Kakao, Kakao," which cry is caused by the choking of the bird with the hair of the heads of those warriors who are doomed to fall in the battle. There are signs also in the sky which the priest can read ; those fragments of the rainbow known as weather galls, and the broad summer lightning unaccompanied with thunder, both these soeak to him of war, and hostile tribes hovering in the same quarter as that where they appear. A solitary star seen near the moon is also a sign that the conflict is at hand, but on the night before the enemy arrive, the chill and piercing Tokihi Kiwi, the starting of the cold wind of battle, is felt throughout the menaced settlement. Other signs are:—the noise of a species of rat called Hatnua ; the singing of the ear, the tossing of the arms, and the gurg ling in the throat in sleep. The cry of the Hamua is " Kato Kato," and this must be distinguished from the rat which is eaten by the Natives, the Kiore, whose cry is " Titiii." When the ear of a person sings it asks, "Is it war ? is it murder ? is it good news ?' is it evil tidings ?" and such like questions ; and the ceasing of noise is held as an answer to the last question asked. When both arms are thrown by the sleeper across his breast, or when he makes a gurgling sound in his throat, this is a certain sign, not so much of war as of private murder. Amongst the Maories, dreams have held invariably a prominent position. We may adduce one or two facts to illustrate this position in addition to what we have already related. A night or two before the news was received of the murder of the Europeans at Wairau near Cook's Straits, Tamati Waka Nene dreamed that a fowl came to the door of a hue.' where ho was lying, and sung to him a war song; this, Waka said, when he awoke was a sign that there had been some Europeans murdered. A<rain just before the breaking out of the Northern war, the same Chief dreamed that the bed on which he was sleeping changed into a canoe, and the floor of the hut into the sea. and that he was fishing there for sharks, the ends also of the firewood turned into sharks, and he caught many of them ; this he. spoke of in the morning, as an omen of a coming war. Again a short distance from where I lived in Hokianga, there resided a Chief with his wife Ramai"' and a family of five children ; oie night Raman in her sleep made the gurgling noise in her throat to which we have before alluded; this was so loud as to wake up the whole family, and being accounted a, certain sign of murder, they all left the hut in terror, and each hid himself separately in the scrub and so passed the remainder of the night. Next day about 300 yards from their hut, a man and his child were found to have been murdered ; old Kamari certainly believed that had they not taken timely warning, and obeyed the omen given to them, they would all have been murdered also. Such are the signs that foretell the breaking out. of war; the principal causes that produce it are quarrels about