Amongst the many curious questions to which the region has given birth, none have more completely baffled inquiry than those suggested by its human inhabitants. From whence, how, and when were its countless scattered islands peopled is still as great a mystery as when Europeans first discovered them. In many of these islands the inhabitants, on our becoming acquainted with them, possessed various arts and had many customs in common with peoples in other distant portions of the world, besides having in cultivation a number of foreign plants, and in domestication a few foreign animals. In addition to these traces of a civilization certainly not endemic, and probably not indigenous, scattered throughout the numerous island groups were monuments evidently of great antiquity, many of them being far beyond the constructive power of the modern inhabitants. By following up these traces to their source it is evident we must obtain, in part at least, a reply to one or more of these questions—from whence, how, and when came the inhabitants of the islands wherein they occur? This course of inquiry was not open to those who first speculated on the “mystery of Polynesia”; with the assistance of physical science, the conclusions arrived at by modern historians and archæologists, and the observations made by travellers and others in various parts of the globe, it may now be possible. Of the three great periods—the Age of Stone, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of Iron—into which the history of art has been divided, the Old World, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, may be regarded as representing the Iron Age, the New World the Bronze Age, and the Pacific region, including Australasia and Polynesia, the Age of Stone. Though the inhabitants of the continent and of the countless islands scattered over the vast ocean may be thus grouped together, in other respects they differ widely. Thus, while the Australian aborigines were mere nomad hunters, the inhabitants of Polynesia and New Zealand were skilful agriculturists. To the more advanced section of the population we must chiefly look for the lost history we are seeking, and for the causes that placed all so far behind in the march of civilization. Amongst the various groups inhabited by the agricultural nations, the New Zealand Archipelago, owing to its geographical position, its size, its varied geological formation, and its climate, is the most important in the present inquiry. Had the islands been first populated by a people acquainted with the methods of obtaining and manufacturing metals, these arts, as well as those connected with agriculture, would have been preserved, notwithstanding the few cultivated plants the