Extracts from Tablets of the Sin of the God Zu.

1.	The god Sarturda (the lesser king) to a country, a place remote (went);
2.	In the land of Sabu (he dwelt).
3.	His mother had not placed him, and had not . . . . (lacuna).
4.	His father had not placed him, and with him did not (go).
5.	The strength of his knowledge . . . .
6.	From the will of his heart a resolution he did not ....
7.	In his own heart a resolution he made.
8.	To the likeness of a bird he changed.
9.	To the likeness of the divine storm bird (or zu bird) he changed, etc.

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Note by Smith.—"This Zu bird I suppose to be the same as the god Zu of the inscriptions. His nature is shown by a passage in the annals of Assurnazirpal ('Cuneiform Inscriptions,' vol. i. p. 22), where he says his warriors 'like the divine zu bird upon them darted.' This bird is called the cloud or storm bird, the flesh-eating bird, the lion or giant bird, the bird of prey, the bird with sharp beak, and it evidently indicates some ravenous bird which was deified by the Babylonians. Some excellent remarks on the nature of this bird are given by Delitzsch, in his 'Assy-rische Studien,' pp. 96, 116."

In the legend of Sarturda it is said that he changed into a Zu bird. Sarturda, which may be explained "the young king," was lord of the city of Amarda or Marad, and he is said to have been the deity worshipped by Izdubar.

Another subject for thought I venture to suggest. The statues of the gods of the Babylonians were covered with cuneiform writing. The carved figures of the ancestors of the Maoris,^* in their large houses, are similarly covered with very regular series of arrow-heads. Is this peculiar ornamentation all that remains of a style of carving that once embodied a language and a religion, the meaning and object of which has long faded away from the popular mind?

The great house of meeting, called Tamatekapua, at Ohinemutu, contains a painting on the left-hand wall-plate. There is the canoe Arawa, which brought that great tribe to New Zealand, with its name written from right to left. There is a tree with a fish fastened to it; there is a sun and a moon. If one asks what is the meaning of the sun, moon, and fish, the people will not be able to tell anything more than that it always was so. The truth is, the picture represents the three great gods, the trinity of their ancestors, Ra, Rono, and Tangaroa (Dakan), sun, moon, and sea.

In a very ancient calendar, furnished to me by Captain Mair, a learned and very indefatigable collector of Maori lore, each day of page 122 the moon is set forth as propitious or otherwise for fishing and planting. Several of the days are named after the old gods of the people, and the twenty-seventh day is called Orongonui, after an ancient name of the moon god. I mention this because Rono or Rona in these days only appears in legends. The calendar is printed in the Appendix.

I will add one word more, calling attention to the marvellous permanency of marked physical characteristics. Jeremiah spoke of the Sabaians as "men of stature," and Herodotus says that the Ethiopians of his day had the character of being the tallest and handsomest nation in the world. A member of one of the learned societies in London lately read a paper containing the heights of all the nations of the world of which he had obtained measurements, and he found that the Polynesians were the tallest people; the Lowland Scotch came next, and the Patagonians ranked third.

And now, having done little more than glanced over our subject, I must draw to a close. 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 honour of the hosts of heaven, which they worshipped as gods, and conducting a gorgeous, though cruel, religion, and were 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.

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If I have by this my contribution left no footprint on the sands of time, I have, at least, said things which will excite thought, and which may attract the attention of abler men, who can command access to books unobtainable here. And, lest any should be inclined to treat these reflections with ridicule, I will finish with an extract from Müller's great work. Noticing the passage in Dr. Rae's writings previously quoted, Müller says: "Strange as it may sound to hear the language of Homer and Ennius spoken of as an off-shoot of the Sandwich Islands, mere ridicule would be a very inappropriate and very inefficient answer to such a theory."