Images of Colonisation: Native Rats and Dying Pillows

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 26, Issue 1, 1 January 1993, Page 33

Images of Colonisation: Native Rats and Dying Pillows

ROSS GALBREATH

In February 1884 Sir Walter Buller gave a presidential address to the Wellington Philosophical Society on the subject of ‘The Decrease of the Maori Race’. He painted a gloomy picture of high mortality and rapid population decline and concluded that the Maori race was ‘dying out very rapidly’, and predicted that in twenty-five years there would be ‘only a remnant left’. He continued in philosophical vein:

He...had often heard Maoris themselves speculate on their speedy extinction, saying in a melancholy way, that as the Norwegian [rat] had destroyed the native rat, and as the indigenous birds and shrubs were being supplanted by the introduced ones, so surely would the Maori disappear before the pakeha. And this was no mere fancy.... What had happened in other parts of the world must inevitably happen, and indeed is happening, here. The aboriginal race must in time give place to a more highly organised, or, at any rate, a more civilized one. This seems to be one of the inscrutable laws of Nature.... He had often reflected on an observation of the late Dr Featherston, on their first meeting, just twenty-eight years ago: ‘The Maoris (he said) are dying out, and nothing can save them. Our plain duty as good compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow. Then history will have nothing to reproach us with.’

Three elements in this address will be examined here: the idea of a ‘law of nature’ that European colonisation inevitably led to the displacement and extermination of native races; the supporting argument by analogy between the displacement of the native people and the native plants and animals - in particular the ‘native rat’; and the image of ‘smoothing down their dying pillow’. Colonisation of any inhabited land involves the displacement of the natives. In New Zealand the native bush and birds were largely replaced by European grass and sheep, and the Maori people were displaced from much of their land. But to the colonists this process seemed not only necessary but inevitable.

On the one hand, they were convinced of the superiority of European and especially ‘Anglo-Saxon people over native races and of European species of plants and animals over native species. This was not just a patriotic pride in one’s own kind; in the nineteenth century the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race became a major preoccupation in British scientific thought as well. In the 1850 s Robert Knox, one of the most outspoken exponents of this idea, argued that ‘race is everything’, and that the northern European ‘Saxon’ or ‘Scandinavian’ race was destined to dominate all others. 2 The widespread decline of native races after Europeans (and their epidemic

diseases) arrived in North America and later in Australia and the Pacific seemed to confirm the view of British or European superiority and native inferiority. It seemed to the colonists that the decrease of the natives was an inevitable process which would continue to final extinction. In New Zealand, predictions were made even before organised colonisation began that the Maori race would ‘melt away’ and die out. One of the more influential of these predictions was that of James Busby, who reported in 1837 that the high mortality among the Maori promised ‘at no very distant period, to leave the country destitute of a single aboriginal inhabitant’. 3 Similar predictions were made of native species - kiwi, kauri and other natives were all expected to rapidly disappear. Just as the Maori race was seen to be declining and was expected to die out, so too were the native species. The apparent universality of the process gave it the force of a law of nature. The idea that the displacement of native races by European colonists was a natural, inevitable process was expressed in the popular saying ‘the black man always disappears before the white’. 4 There was also much philosophical discussion about this ‘law of nature’. In New Zealand, as earlier in North America, some saw it as a form of divine providence, clearing the way for the colonists. For instance, Ernest Dieffenbach speculated in 1843 whether it was ‘the design of Providence that the [Maori] race should disappear’. 5

F.D. Fenton in 1859 favoured a rather different idea, of‘a law of nature, mysterious and inscrutable, under which no species can perpetuate itself beyond a certain period’. He argued that the Maori race was near the end of its natural life and had been in ‘decay’ even before the European colonisation of the country began. 6 This idea, of racial ‘decay’, may be distinguished from from that of racial ‘degeneration’ - the idea that over time some races had degenerated or fallen to a state of savage barbarism. In the early nineteenth century the idea that ‘savage’ races had fallen to their ‘degraded’ condition was part of the evangelical creed of the missionary societies, who saw the Maori in this light and accordingly sought to raise and redeem them. The idea of racial decay, leading to the ‘death’ or extinction of the race was discussed in the learned societies of Britain, and in the New Zealand philosophical societies. Its best-known expression is in Dr A.K. Newman’s paper on ‘the causes leading to the extinction of the Maori’ presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1882. Newman compared the ‘rapidly progressing’ Anglo-Saxon with the ‘run out’ or ‘effete’ Maori. His conclusion has often been quoted:

I hope I have made it clear that the Maoris were a disappearing race before we came here.... Taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.

A natural law of racial ‘decay’ explained the decrease of the Maori as a phenomenon occurring prior to and independently of colonisation; the

colonists in New Zealand were thus not so much displacing the Maori as replacing them. Johannes Andersen succinctly expressed this idea in his 1906 Christchurch Exhibition Ode: ‘Ye were dying ere we came!’ 8 The idea of racial decay was thus quite different from that of displacement by competition between races. Although this idea is often labelled as ‘Social Darwinism’, it was expressed long before Darwin. To give a New Zealand example, Ernest Dieffenbach in 1843, as well as invoking ‘the design of Providence’, also saw the decline of the Maori race in terms of competitive struggle: It may be that it is one of Natures eternal laws that some races of men, like the different kinds of organic beings, plants, and animals, stand in opposition to each other; that is to say, where one race begins to spread and increase, the other, which is perhaps less vigorous and less durable, dies off. 9

From the time Darwins The Origin of Species was published in 1859 ‘the struggle for existence’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ became popular catch-phrases. Darwin avoided discussion of competition between human races in The Origin of Species, but he did include the displacement of New Zealand native plants and animals among his evidence for natural selection or ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’. 10 The New Zealand philosophical societies were even more reticent; any discussion of Darwin’s idea of natural selection was avoided or suppressed until the 1890 s, and even then concentrated more on native plants and animals rather than people. For instance, in 1918 E.F. Hawthorne gave a Darwinian explanation of the ‘law’ of displacement of native species:

It is a fact well known to naturalists that animals and plants of the Southern Hemisphere are almost invariably beaten in the struggle for existence when brought into competition with the living productions of the Northern Hemisphere. The latter have been evolved in a harder school than the former, and the southern forms have but a poor chance of survival against their hardier and more vigorous rivals from the north. We in New Zealand have already seen this law in operation: witness the fate of so many of our beautiful native birds.

At the same time, comparisons were often drawn between the displacement and extinction of the native plants and animals, and the native people. In New Zealand the case of the ‘extermination’ of the native rat by European rats became a standard biological analogy for the European colonisation of New Zealand with its expected outcome of dominance by the colonists and extinction of the native people. The comparison was also turned the other way: that just as the Maori people were being displaced by the colonists, and the native rat by the European rat, so would the native birds and other species be displaced by introduced European species. 12 To follow the development of the analogy of the rats, some zoological background and nomenclature is necessary. By the mid nineteenth century there were three species of rat established in New Zealand. The native rat or kiore (Rattus exulans) had been in New Zealand as long as the Maori people

- it probably arrived with them. It was a relatively small species, mainly vegetarian, and was a valued Maori food item. The ship or black rat (Rattus rattus), and the Norway or brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), came with the Europeans, probably beginning when Cook’s rat-infested Endeavour first put a line ashore. The European species, especially the Norway rat, was rather larger than the kiore. When Richard Cruise visited northern New Zealand in 1820 he reported that ‘the native rats are so much smaller than the European rat, that a chief expressed a wish for an importation of some from England to improve the breed, and thereby give him a more bountiful meal’. 13

By the 1830 s, however, Maori were expressing more concern about the displacement of the native rat. The introduced rats were taking over, and they were not good to eat. Comparisons between the displacement of the native rat by European rats and the predicted displacement of the Maori people evidently began to be made at this time too. Edward Markham recorded it in 1834 - not as a Maori saying as Buller and others later gave it, but as a Pakeha taunt, telling Maori that they, like the native rats, were bound for extinction. 14 The following year Charles Darwin spent ten days in the Bay of Islands and reported that ‘the common Norway rat has entirely annihilated (in the short space of two years) the New Zealand species’. He also commented on the decline of native races in general, and the Maori race in particular:

There appears to be some mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.... The varieties of man seem to act upon each other in the same way as different species of animals - the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy in New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children.

Since he did not understand the language Darwin probably heard this melancholy prediction from missionaries rather than Maori. Ernest Dieffenbach, after travelling through New Zealand in 1839-41, also reported the ‘extermination’ of the kiore, although he blamed it on the ship rat rather than the Norway rat. Dieffenbach went on to mention the analogy with the displacement of the Maori people - but rather than a colonist’s taunt, he quoted it as a Maori lament: It is a favourite theme with them to speculate on their own extermination by the Europeans, in the same manner as the English rat has exterminated their indigenous rat.

Maori displacement by European colonisation thus became expressed in a memorable image. Dieffenbach’s book was widely read - indeed Buffers scientific interest in the native rat was kindled by it. Buller, like Dieffenbach asserted that the extermination of the kiore had become a common Maori saying or ‘proverb’ - and quoted it in several of his scientific papers. 17 The rat proverb was repeated by others in New Zealand and picked up in turn by European scientific authorities. Darwin was particularly impressed by it

and quoted it to illustrate the ‘parallelism’ between the extinction of human races and of species of animals. It was quoted also by Alfred Wallace, Joseph Hooker, Ferdinand von Hochstetter, and other lesser figures in Britain and Europe. 18 It gained very wide currency. It was quoted reassuringly in British handbooks for intending colonists, and in New Zealand school readers for colonial children. 19 Few of the colonists who recited it could have told the difference between a native and a European rat (even scientific men such as Buller found this difficult) 20 , but as a ‘Maori proverb’ it had taken on a life of its own.

But was it really a ‘Maori proverb’? It may well have been expressed by Maori; certainly the statements of Dieffenbach and Buller - who both understood the language well enough - cannot be entirely discounted. But for all the general assertions that ‘the Maoris themselves say’, no report has been found of it being said by any particular Maori person or at any particular occasion. The rat analogy seems to have been much more a colonist’s platitude than a Maori proverb.

There is another twist to it from the European side. Displacement of a native rat by an invading species was not an entirely new phenomenon. During the eighteenth century the large Norway rat had all but displaced the ship rat throughout Europe, and in the nineteenth century was continuing the process in India, the United States and elsewhere. In England, the invading Norway rats with their many offspring and their large appetites had been identified by some with the then newly-arrived German royal dynasty and labelled the ‘Hanoverian’ rat, displacing the ‘old English’ rat. 21 In the New Zealand context the Norway and ship rats were both regarded as ‘English’ rats colonising the new country and displacing the ‘native’ or ‘Maori’ rat - a rather different analogy, but just as topical in its time. The other image from Buller’s 1884 address -of ‘smoothing down their dying pillow’ - has generally been attributed to Dr I.E. Featherston and often dated to 1856, evidently on the basis of Buller’s reference that he heard it from Featherston ‘just twenty-eight years ago’. Certainly Featherston frequently expressed his view of the impending extinction of the Maori race. In 1851 as secretary of the Wellington Constitutional Association he argued that there was no need to accord Maori any political rights because ‘there is no prospect of their becoming as a body sufficiently enlightened for the exercise of political privileges before the period of their extinction shall arrive’. 22 After he was elected Superintendent of Wellington he took a more humanitarian line. In his 1855 speech from the throne he told his Provincial Council that:

Although I myself have long since come to the conclusion that no human means can possibly prevent the extinction at no distant date of the Native Race...still humanity and sound policy equally plead in favour of our doing our utmost to retard that event." In 1860 Featherston (now in Parliament) spoke strongly against the ‘unjust and unholy war’ being waged against Maori in Taranaki. C.W. Richmond

retaliated by misquoting Featherston’s 1855 speech back at him, charging that his ‘temporising’ policy relied on the ‘hope’ of speedy extinction. Richmond, while defending the government’s war policy, thus contrived to take the humanitarian high ground: The extinction of the Maori race, I say, is the sole reliance of the temporizers, and it is one on which I should refuse to found a system, since it is our bound en duty by all means to counteract the decline of the Native people. 24

There was a fine line between predicting or expecting extinction, and hoping for it; the former was unexceptional and acceptable but, in public speeches at least, the latter was condemned as ‘wicked’. 25 During the Waikato campaign against Maori ‘rebels’ Featherston continued to maintain that the Maori race was dying out. In February 1866, at an election meeting in the Wellington Oddfellows Hall, he repeated his views: As it was utterly impossible to preserve the race, to prevent its speedy extinction; our chief duty was to make the dying couch of the race as easy - as comfortable as possible.

This is evidently the source of Buller’s line, though ten years later than he recalled it. In the 1880 s when Buller gave his address the Maori population had fallen below 50,000, against over 500,000 colonists. Renewed Maori resistance to being displaced from the land aroused much bellicose talk among the colonists (and a show of military force at Parihaka), but the humanitarian sentiment was also prominent again. Robert Stout, for instance, was mindful of the reproach of posterity: The [Maori] race is dying, and if we were at all affected with the love of humanity we should strive to preserve it, or to make its dying moments as happy as possible.... We are powerful, they are weak, and that is the only explanation that the future historian will give of our conduct/

The Rev. J. Wohlers, addressing the Southland Institute in 1881, spoke of the ‘dying out’ of the Maori and the ‘coming in of a superior race to take their place and to make better use of it’. His law of nature incorporated divine providence as well as racial decay: When the Maori race was going to die He caused a race, best fitted for His purpose of mercy, to come and smooth the bed of the dying Maoris with Christian consolation and bodily comfort.

Buller expressed a similar sentiment of humanitarian condolence but while quoting Featherston he evidently borrowed his elegaic line - ‘smooth down their dying pillow’ - from a familiar English ballad (the Rev. Charles Wolfe’s The Burial of Sir John Moore). 29 This version is certainly the most memorable - it has been quoted ever since. In 1891 W.B Reeves adapted it to make an attack on the upper house of parliament, the legislative council:

We should treat it as we do the remnants of the Maori race - treat them as the venerable remains of a noble race.... we should not harass them or hasten their end, but let them die

peacefully. We should smooth their declining years, and not roughly jerk the pillow from under their enfeebled heads. We should treat them kindly, gently, and considerately, and let them die out.

There had evidently been no Maori among Buller’s audience at the Wellington Philosophical Society, but there were certainly Maori in parliament when Reeves spoke. One of them, James Carroll, later tried to correct him. The idea that the Maori race was on its deathbed was a ‘mistaken theory’, he argued; and the notion of smoothing down their dying pillow was ‘sentimental nonsense’. 31

In 1891 Carroll’s objections had little impact on colonial attitudes. But from 1901 the idea of inevitable native extinction faced a more serious challenge when census results began showing progressive increases in Maori population statistics. Some colonists did begin to accept that the Maori might persist as a living people, but many ignored or explained away the evidence that did not conform to their expectation. In the philosophical societies the idea of the dying Maori race continued to be discussed. In 1902, after the first rise in Maori census figures, Henry Hill gave a paper to the Hawkes Bay society on ‘this fading but noble race’. 32 In 1907, after a further rise, Archdeacon P. Walsh addressed the Auckland Society (the Auckland Institute) on ‘The Passing of the Maori: An Inquiry into the Principle Causes of the Decay of the Race’. Walsh remained convinced that the Maori race was doomed under the fatal impact of European colonisation. He rejected the rising trend in Maori census figures as a statistical artefact arising from more complete counts; the Maori race, he asserted, was ‘sick unto death, and is already potentially dead’. 33

Walshs views did not go unchallenged. Among his audience were two Maori, Drs Maui Pomare and Te Rangihiroa (Peter Buck), who politely differed from his view that their race was on its deathbed. But Walsh was so convinced of the inevitability of Maori extinction that he confidently predicted that ‘the next census will show that the Maori population, instead of increasing, has been diminishing all the time’. 34 The next census in 1911 actually showed a further increase. Even then the colonists’ expectation of native extinction persisted. One of the census enumerators commented in his official report that ‘the position is hopeless...the race is dying...and that all that can be done now is to make things as easy as possible for them’ - in other words, to smooth down their dying pillow. 35 After attending Walshs address in 1907 Pomare joined the Wellington Philosophical Society andTe Rangihiroa the Auckland Institute - apparently the first Maori to join any of the philosophical societies. 36 In 1922, after Walshs death, Te Rangihiroa addressed the Auckland Institute himself, ironically reusing Walsh’s title ‘The Passing of the Maori’ to introduce a carefully-argued rebuttal of the ideas expressed by Featherston, Newman, Buller, Walsh and others that the Maori race was ‘effete’ or ‘decaying’ or ‘dying’. He quoted Walsh’s diagnosis that the Maori race had been (in 1907)

‘already potentially dead’. At this point he departed from his written text to comment that ‘all I can say is that it is a good healthy corpse’. 37 After this, although the idea of the dying race persisted in some popular attitudes, little more was heard of it in the philosophical societies or other scholarly circles. The image of‘smoothing down the dying pillow’ became used in academic and popular historical writing, not in support of the idea of displacement and extinction of the natives, but to illustrate these ideas as held in the colonial past. Bullers eminently quotable line has thus been quoted and misquoted by innumerable New Zealand writers and has also found its way into the international literature on race relations as an apt expression of the nineteenth century colonial expectation of Maori extinction. It is still being quoted in the 1990 s. 38

The rat analogy, still in the form of a supposed Maori saying, was reused in another way, to support conjectures that during the latter part of the nineteenth century the Maori people passed through a period of psychological depression and despair. 39 As an image of inevitable extinction the analogy had already lost some of its force in the 1890 s when doubts were raised whether the native rat had in fact been entirely displaced and exterminated. When some rat specimens were identified as kiore, one expert on the subject, Elsdon Best, refused to accept them, in much the same way as most colonial authorities at the time were refusing to accept the evidence of the census statistics that the Maori race was not dying. 40 However, the kiore, like the Maori people, does still survive in New Zealand, in some areas alongside its European counterparts. There was indeed a great deal of displacement of natives by colonists, but in most cases the process did not proceed to extinction. The colonists have become New Zealanders, and kauri, kiwi, kiore, and Maori live on. Long may they all continue to flourish.

REFERENCES 1 Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 17 (1885), 443-4. (Reprinted from the report of Bullers address in New Zealand Times, 16 February 1884). 2 The Races of Man, quoted in R. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981), pp. 71-73. See also C. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971). 3 Busby, 16 June 1837, quoted by Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity : British Intervention in New Zealand 1830-1847 (Auckland, 1977), p. 88. 4 For New Zealand expressions of this or similar adages see W.T.L. Travers, in Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 2 (1870), p. 11; J.E. Gorst, The Maori King (London, 1864), 11. 5 Travels in New Zealand (London, 1843), 11, p. 15. 6 F.D. Fenton, Observations on the State of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of New Zealand (Auckland, 1859), pp. 32, 39-41. 7 A Study of the Causes leading to the Extinction of the Maori’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 14 (1882), 459-77.

8 ‘The Exhibition Ode’, in J. Cowan, Official Record of the New Zealand International Exhibition...l9o6-7 (Wellington, 1910), p. 83. 9 Travels in New Zealand, (London, 1843), 11, pp. 14-15. 10 The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection (London, 1859), pp. 201-2, 337. 11 ‘Proposed Introduction of Animals and Plants’, New Zealand Journal of Science and Technology, 1 (1918), 318-9. 12 W.L. Buller, A History of the Birds of New Zealand, second edition, Vol. I (London, 1888), p. 55. 13 R.A. Cruise, Journal ofa Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand (London 1823), p. 285. 14 Edward Markham, New Zealand or Recollections of It, edited by E, H. McCormick (Wellington, 1963), p. 53. A similar version, probably from the Taranaki region in the 1840 s, is given by Charles Hursthouse, Letters on New Zealand Subjects (London, 1865?), pp. 37-8. 15 C. Darwin, in EG. King, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle..., Vol. 11l (London, 1839), pp. 511, 520. 16 Op. cit. [see note 9], p. 185. 17 W.L. Buller, ‘On the New Zealand Rat’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 3 (1871), 1-4; A History of the Birds of New Zealand, second edition, Vol. I (London, 1888), p. 55; MaoriMessenger/TeKarereMaori (30 November 1860), pp. 1-3. 18 Charles Darwin, The Descent ofMan\ and Selection in Relation to Sex, second edition,

(London, 1874), p. 297; Alfred Wallace, Island Life (London, 1880), p. 445, and Darwinism (London, 1889), p. 34; J.D. Hooker, ‘Note on the Replacement of Species in the Colonies and Elsewhere’, Popular Science Review, 6 (1867), 131-9 (see p. 137); F. von Hochstetter, New Zealand; Its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History (Stuttgart, 1867), p. 222; G.J. Romanes, Darwin, and After Darwin, Vol. I (London, 1892), p. 286. 19 S. W. Silver & Co. s Handbook for Australian and New Zealand, third edition (London, 1880), p. 382; The New Zealand Graphic Reader, Sixth Book [Auckland, 1905?], p. 256. 20 The specimen of “Kiore” obtained at great expense by Buller and described by him in his 1871 paper (see note 15) is now considered to have been a ship rat. See I.A.E. Atkinson, ‘Spread of the Ship Rat (Rattus r. rattus} in New Zealand’, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 3 (1973), 457-72. 21 Atkinson, p. 459; L. Barber, The Heyday of Natural History 1820-1870 (London, 1980), p. 105. See also Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 3 (1871), 24, recalling the earlier displacement. 22 New Zealand Spectator, 1 February 1851. 23 Wellington Provincial Council. Journal of Proceedings (1855), p. 6. 24 N.Z. Parliamentary Debates (1858-1860), pp. 222, 330. 25 Ibid, p. 345.

26 Wellington Independent, 24 February 1866. 27 Quoted by G.W. Rusden, Aureretanga: Groans of the Maoris (London, 1888), p. 108. 28 J.F.H. Wohlers, ‘On the Conversion and Civilization of the Maoris in the South of New Zealand”, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 14 (1882), 123-34. 29 Wolfes ballad, much recited in Victorian times, includes the line ‘We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed/And smoothed down his lonely pillow...’. The line in Buller’s address was evidently recognised as a quotation: it is italicised in the reports in New Zealand Times 16 February 1884, and as reprinted in Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 17 (1885), 444. 30 N.Z. Parliamentary Debates, 68 (1890), p. 186. 31 Appendices to the Journal of the House ofßepresentatives (1891)Gl,p. xxix. 32 H. Hill, ‘The Maoris Today and Tomorrow. No. 2’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 35 (1903), 169-86.

33 P. Walsh, ‘The Passing of the Maori: an Inquiry into the Principal Causes of the Decay of the Race’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, AO (1908), 154-75. 34 Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 40 (1908), 175, 566-7. 35 Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (1911) HI4A, p. 10. 36 Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 40 (1908), 562, 567. 37 Te Rangi Hiroa, ‘The Passing of the Maori’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 55 (1924), 362-75; New Zealand Herald, 17 October 1922, p. 9. 38 See for instance A. Anderson, Race Against Time... Hocken Lecture 1990 (Dunedin, 1991), p. 17. 39 Raymond Firth, Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori (London, 1929), p. 467. 40 W.L. Buller, ‘Note on Mus maorium (Hutton), with exhibition of specimen’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 25 (1893), 49-50; T. White, ‘Remarks on the Rats of New Zealand’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 27, (1895), 240-61; Elsdon Best, ‘Maori Forest Lore.... Part ll’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 41 (1909), 231-85 (see p. 242).